


Cougar Shot Down a UFO

by nagasvoice



Category: Billy Jack, Hawaii Five-0 (2010), NCIS: Los Angeles, The Avengers (2012), The Losers, The Sentinel, The X-Files
Genre: Canon Character of Color, F/M, Female Character of Color, Humor, M/M, Multi, POV Male Character, Pre-Canon, Sexual Humor
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-05-15
Updated: 2013-05-20
Packaged: 2017-12-11 22:35:02
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 24
Words: 71,116
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/804005
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nagasvoice/pseuds/nagasvoice
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It just figures that, in the initial collision of Jake Jensen with Cougar, Jake's opening salvos would be loud, verbal, quotes of classic rock.<br/>And it also figures that he'd be interrupting Cougar indulging in a nice, intense session of serious sniper brooding, aka lurking.  What else is there to do, when sitting in the rocks in the hills above an Afghan village?<br/>Well, he's about to find out...</p><p>This is a work of affection and not profit, no infringement of any copyrights or trademarks on these characters is intended.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Lurk Like a Big Cat

**Author's Note:**

> This long piece of complete crack-fic continues onward from Chapter 24 (you've been warned!) into another long piece I did for the 2013 Losers Ante-Up Bang. That's here.  
> http://archiveofourown.org/works/960393/chapters/1881674
> 
> Many thanks to cougars_catnip, my beta reader, who kept me cheered up and caught some real bloopers. This was originally intended to join the Ante-Up-Losers Big Bang 2012 Scramble, but that didn't happen in time, and the mods for the Bang 2012 let me add it in late, yay! One of the reasons I decided to post it on AO3 was the very great pleasure I've had in reading other folk's work here, and I'd like to thank them for that. Also, hopefully, add some note of cheer and inspiration for the Losers 2013 Big Bang! Come take a look, see if it gives you great ideas!  
> http://archiveofourown.org/collections/Losers_Big_Bang_2013
> 
> or  
> http://ante-up-losers.dreamwidth.org/27853.html
> 
> Warnings: Lots of NC-17-type bad language, some homophobic slurs, combat, violence, threats of violence, threats of arson, references to opiate drug smuggling and to mythical supernatural creatures. Roque is just rude, yeah, but so is Cougar, in the privacy of his own head. More explicit smex and rudeness to come in later chapters-- sadly, not in this one.  
> I’m not sure what else should be included, please feel free to request that I precheck for you on a particular warning, and to comment.  
> Also, this is a multi-chapter series, complete in itself, which I will be posting in parts as I can.  
> I also have a tendency to edit when I notice typos etc., so feel free to let me know for corrections.  
> There's also a further sequel to be written.  
> More Notes at the end...  
> Blanket permission statement: You do not need to ask my permission to remix, podfic, translate, create art for or create secondary fanworks of any fanwork I have posted publicly. I would love to see it, please share it with us by dropping me a PM or an email here, on DW, or on lj, where I am also nagasvoice.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Snipers are used to entertaining themselves. Also, of course, creating a zone of zen brain flow with the terrain that allows them not to blink too much when things crawl on them.  
> I guess they're not so used to hysteria, although that happens in combat situations too.

Cougar expects any number of disruptions when he’s staring down from a pretty long-range dusty hide into a mudbrick compound full of raggedy-ass villagers in mud-brown robes, heads down, bowing, and getting harangued by some preaching guy.  Some wealthy guy, maybe a local landlord.  That guy sure isn’t living in the dirt.  Those clothes never scrubbed along in the brush like the pale butt of Cougar’s jeans.  Or the bug-stained knees.  The only scorpions those clothes ever encountered is the guy in them.

Something’s way off down there.  The villagers must know the guy, yet nobody has come out and invited him to sit down with them over tea.  They are always punctilious about hospitality to strangers, always.  Or else he’s refused them, which is the height of rudeness either way.

At this point almost anything could break up the tension down there.  He’s seen some nutty things happen in other villages.  Whatever it’s going to be, it’s overdue.  Even his camera-scope is tired of taking pictures of mud-colored everything--or else it’s picking up silt-fine dust in the mechanism.  Cougar’s SR-25 hasn’t happened to them yet.  It maybe won’t.

The guy yelling away down there is not, actually, any of the very similar-looking six guys Cougar was sent here to shoot, no such luck.  He was not sure the Company handler for this op could have picked out any of the different guys in a lineup, but Cougar made sure of that for himself.  He’s got standards.  He’d know them even if they tried to trim the beards differently and go all mufti in mud colors.  It’s a matter of professional pride.

The long-winded preaching guy probably deserves shooting too.  That painfully intense shade of indothrene car-paint purple does _not_ go with any other color on earth.  But no, Cougar doesn’t act on personal prejudices.  Just CENTCOM ones, the kind that get listed in Cougar’s DOPE book with quasi-official authorization.  Or as much as you ever get on black ops. 

The guy in the purple stripes came parading into the village with flags, unfamiliar ones.  Under those flags, he drove in with a convoy of trucks of weapons and something like bricks on pallets, all wrapped in shrinkwrap film plastic.  It’s all part of the modern smuggler’s anti-theft methods.  The pallets look ridiculously like they’re heading for a big box store in the ‘burbs, but that stuff is not destined to become somebody’s patio. 

Truth?  That is one massive load of black tar resin collected from fields of poppies just like those all across the valley.  Those dusty grayed-out fields?  Not dryland rice.  Not pulses, not wheat, not barley, not food at all.  Lots and lots of poppies.  More poppies climb steep terraces chewed by hand into every dirt slope in sight.  Gnawed-up foothills on all sides, a tribute to the suitable local climate.

The farm terraces look like dusty towns near the DMZ in Korea; on his first hitch, he spent a couple of miserably muggy summers there.  Cougar entertains himself for entire hours at a stretch by recalling the shapes of the characters labeled on all the crazy pickles that he tried there.  Gotta practice that kind of memory, like an actor doing lines.  Then he works on checking his memory of the unfamiliar flags down there, making sure he can draw them correctly later on, away from risk of capture or interrogation.

Stay sharp, they say, practice your visual memory all the time.  Training involves recall of random odd items seen briefly, trainers slinking through the grass, playing the grownup version of Kim’s Game.  Here, he has to remember tiny variations in mud colors, because that shadow is just an old wall pocked with mortar fire, but _that’s_ a doorway. 

The preacher hasn’t shut up since he arrived just after dawn.  There he is, waving his purple-striped arms.  Haranguing about who to vote for, maybe, mixed up with religious instruction, jumping around his trucks full of guns and not-bricks.  Yes, my dear, poppies will make them _sleep..._ Yellow brick road time for all the addicts in Eastern Europe, by the look of those pallets.

Hard to tell which one of several political candidates he’s raving about.  Pooch said an hour ago that guy is not using Pashto. If the locals do understand, they’re pretty good at the dumb not-getting-it look, he can see that much.  Even the kids do it, especially when they’re sliding away from the guards.  Yay for decent scopes.

If the preacher is a landlord around here, he’s really wealthy one.  He brought in more big buff steroidal bodyguards than there are kids in the place, which is saying something.  The village population is seriously skewed, almost all kids.  Which means all the working men have run away, gone off somewhere else for work, got killed, joined the resistance fighters, or got tossed in prison by one side or the other.  Or all of the above.  The women hide inside, so they get killed whenever somebody bombs the buildings.

This village looks pretty good compared to some.  Nobody’s gone through lately clearing out insurgents house-to-house, there’s no new scorch marks on the mud walls.  Just old shell-holes on fallen houses, which could have been the Russians thirty years ago.  It’s all exercises in muted colors, deceptive slopes, dusty door-drapes, skinny dust-covered kids sneaking around in back.  They move whenever they think the preacher man won’t see them, and they’re perched all over, on both sides of the valley.  Watch long enough, and the slopes look like anthills of hidden dusty little figures.

Any time now, one of those kids who’s circled round uphill from Cougar will get the courage to come down out of the rocks above his position--rocks which they know a helluva lot better than he does.  He’s pretty sure the kids will get up their courage long before the preacher man down there gives up and drives off, taking his bodyguards with him.

The lead kid will be about eleven, probably armed with a slingshot or a throwing stick or a home-made bow, with which they are deadly accurate.  He’s noticed a remarkable shortage of rabbits up in these rocks.  The other kids will be younger.  They’ll only have a few words of Pashto among them, but that never stops them.  They’ll squat down for a nice chat in gestures, holding out their hands begging, and they’ll ask him for medicines for their sick relatives.  They’re poor, living out here, and rich Americans like him _always_ have medicines.

He expects them to invite him down to have tea.  He’d be crazy to drink any of it, but that’s never stopped him.  His CO, Clay, tells people that Cougar is good at translating gestures because that’s all he ever uses.  He doesn’t tell Clay that it’s a lot harder when he’s facing the flat stares of kids who’ve seen too many people die out here.  He knows the kids will threaten him, offer to give away his position, and it might happen accidentally if they’re just moving around too much, getting excited.  But he’s never shot one.  Somehow they always seem to know that, too.

What Cougar does not expect, two hours after daybreak, is for the comm to start howling in his ear. 

Howling noises.

Deafening loud howling noises.

 _“Wheeeeeerewolves of London--”_ That one’s not a familiar voice at all.

Cougar winces, dials down the volume.  Then he hears cursing, familiar voices yelping in pain.

“Charlie Foxtrot Alpha Actual, who is _singing_ on the comm?” Clay’s measured tones growl it out like the slow, inevitable thump of boot heels on a tombstone.  He’s good at that.

_“...Going to get a big dish of beef chow mein._

_Ahhwooooo... Werewolves of London, Ahwooooo!...”_

“Get the hell off the comm, you skunk-fucking, knuckle-dragging--” Roque curses like a DI in some kind of contest to defy radio protocol.  But even if he stuck to the rules, there’s no disguising that voice.  He’s forgot more than the rest of the unit will ever know, he’s the damn Captain, their SIC, Second In Command, he doesn’t _have_ to drill FNGs any more.  He likes to torture FNGs--Fucking New Guys--but on his terms, when _he_ chooses, not obligated to it on a training schedule.  He’s damned sure it’s some drunk FNG out there from somebody else’s op, some damfool fellow soldier from some other fucked up team, out here wandering all over their frequency like a tourist making an ass of themselves.  He also talks with the deep conviction that whoever he’s yelling at will be improved by a little knife-to-vital parts ventilation.  It’s convincing.  Even better than Clay’s nasty voices.

_“...You hear him howling around your kitchen door,_

_You better not let him in._

_Little old lady got mutilated late last night...”_

“Lima Papa Four, well daaayum, dummy, at least get the damn verses in the _right order!_ Warren Zevon must be spinning in his grave!”   Pooch, their driver/mechanic, sounds like he’s just bickering on the comm at some Presidential airfield, not like he’s looking down at all the guards on this convoy of pallet-loads.  But that drawling Chuck Yeager pilot voice means he’s really ticked off.

Pooch might be a mellow guy, but he _hates_ it when somebody starts scrambling classic lyrics out of order.  Order is his thing.  One of the best ways to mess with him, honestly--and by now the strain of this damn underfunded improv rust-bucket op is really showing on the Pooch’s temper.

In some crucial ways, the Pooch is an obsessive sort.  Pooch likes to lay out parts in arrays on the garage floor, packs his tools clean.  He _croons_ over replacing belts and tires on some farm truck rotted out in the weeds.  It’s not insulting for him to work on a rusty helo that got shot down by the local poppy growers and stolen back again.  No, what’s _insulting_ is asking him to put it in the air in ten hours without even testing the rotor balance on an old bedsheet.  Idiotic.  Foolhardy.  In violation of standing orders, no less.

_“...Ahhwooooo... Werewolves of London, Ahwooooo! Huh!”_

Whoever’s cracked their comm channel encryption is breathing oddly.  The wailing has hiccups in it.  Or static, as if the stranger’s broadcast is cutting in and out.

_“...He's the hairy handed gent who ran amok in Kent...”_

“Shut up, you inbred mutt-fucker!” Roque roars.

The light voice hiccups a breath, laughs, and sings,

_“...You better stay away from him,_

_He'll rip your lungs out, Jim,_

_Huh! I'd like to meet his tailor...”_

“Lima Papa Four, I’m promising you, dumbass, whoever said it was open mike night, I’mma kick his ass.  Just lemme get a damn fix on him and--” There’s a wavering line of strain in the Pooch’s high notes like over-tightened guitar wire.  Like a guy who will snap, at the slightest excuse, and buzz down in his stolen old helo and just damn well strafe your sorry ass.  Also very convincing.  No reality there, though.  Pooch’s rickety helo has no functional belly gun for strafing.  You’d never know it from his voice, not at all.

Another reason Cougar doesn’t bother talking much.  With badass voices like that, who needs to compete?

“Uhhhh, Lima Papa Four, on your six--”  There’s that deadpan note in Clay’s voice.  He always gets that tone right before the shooting starts.

There’s an uneven, oscillating high-frequency whine coming from some distance, fast.  Almost dog-whistle range, just barely into the upper end of Cougar’s range.  He still has decent hearing for a guy who shoots that many practice rounds, but he knows he’s lost some of his upper register.

“I see it, I see it, hey, Papa Four will you just get a fucking _bead_ on him--”

“Pooch, _there’s a UFO on your six.”_

“Flaming hell-- I know that, Clay, I know, I know it’s a goddamn UFO!”

“Pooch, it’s a UFO!”  That’s Roque’s deeper growl. 

Roque is set up over in the next outcrop down the slope from Cougar.  It sounds like this just cured his boredom.  If anybody else is listening in, the Losers just metaphorically jumped onstage in hula leis, coconut bras and grass skirts, banging on bongos like a drunkass spring break party gone bad.  That sort of thing happens in real life, back at base, too.

Last time Roque destroyed the cell phones, but Pooch claims his enamorata, Jolene, kept all the blackmail pictures for him.

_“...Well, I saw Lon Chaney walking with the Queen,_

_Doing the Werewolves of London...”_

The whine is approaching faster, the oscillation in the tone complex, unstable.

“Shoot it, shoot that fucker!  It’s too damn tight on your six, Pooch, shoot that damn UFO right damn now!”  Roque never gets hysterical.  Just ask him.  Nope.  That’s plain simple blindass berserkergang.  He’ll run down at _anything,_ arms windmilling.  On a guy that big, with that many knives, it’s really something to see.

Pooch is yelling something technical about fuses, electronics, and belly guns that need repair, throwing that helo around like he’s playing some flight simulator game.  Clay can’t be having a fun ride.  Vomit Comet simulator, maybe.

“Who knows what the fuck it’s got on board!  Shoot that fucker!” Roque roars.

“Not happening, Roque, ten hours and no spare parts, remember?” Pooch roars back.

Cougar adjusts the scope very slightly up from the Afghan compound of startled faces all staring skyward.  Just behind the buzzing banged up old French helo, which is jinking around in the sky like a spastic dragonfly, is a round thing. 

A round spinning thing.  A flattened pie pan disk that is clearly spinning.  Aluminum-colored, about fifty feet across, with darker symbol marks on it, spinning.  The whine sounds like unbalanced aircraft engine parts.  Cougar’s camera hums away, taking stills and then video.

“Shoot it!” Pooch screams.

“Cougar, get it!” Clay is screaming too.

“Cougar shoot that damn UFO out of the damn sky--” Roque is screaming.  _Screaming._  None of them will admit it later.  He knows that.  Like always.  Assholes.

At a little over 300 feet up, and maybe 400 feet lateral distance, it would be a truly lousy shot if Cougar tried and missed the spinning thing.  However, there’s some question whether such light-jacketed rounds will have any impact.  The SR-25 is loaded for anti-personnel shots.  His M82, the gun he uses to knock down materiel, is longer and heavier, not as good for crawling around under local observation, so it’s still packed in the helo with Pooch and Clay.

Clay has got to have the M82 up and loaded by now, but he might not believe he can take some decent shots before the spinning thing does something to them _first._  The man’s pretty damn fast racking in the mag clips when properly motivated.  However, his shooting will be impaired by Pooch’s attempts to defy physics.  Or else Pooch is losing his battles with the chopper’s cyclic.  Such erratic swings will have them interposing in and out on Cougar’s shot for some time. 

He adjusts his bipod, considers what he’s noticed on the windage at that height.  That is automatic for him, even if nobody else ever seriously _expects_ a sniper to shoot light anti-personnel rounds at blue sky targets past their own ride.  Nobody.  Well, nobody sane.

Well, they didn’t, back in the day, back when he was trained.

He got jeered in refresher training, asking about that, until copies of the relevant mission reports hit all the desks in front of them, _bang._  Redacted heavily, of course.

It was embarrassing.  When did he ever get so damn predictable?  His aerial shooting has become a fucking _case study._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Lex Munro did a brilliant, insightful, expertly acronym-heavy story for the Losers, complete with a great vocabulary listing I found extremely helpful. That’s here:  
> http://archiveofourown.org/series/10315  
> That one’s compelling enough that I tend to take a lot of Lex's information as personal head-canon. The whole thing about Cougar leaping into choppers instead of waiting for them to land, for instance. Or mechanical bull-riding...


	2. Flashback to the Peanut Gallery

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sniper training keeps a hard school, but fools will learn in no other.

“You shot down a Special Forces MH-47 helo with an SR-25 loaded with conventional anti-personnel NATO rounds at approximately 700 feet up, Sergeant Alvarez?” says the trainer. 

Nod.  It didn’t deserve more.  He hated classes and inspections and official business, which meant going without his hat.  Hated blippy old flourescent lighting.  Hated pulling desks in a circle.  Hated _group discussions._  

“You took out the helo’s mast with, what, a 7mm bullet?  _How the hell?”_  

He shrugs.  None of the mission review folks wanted to hear that either.  And oh, yeah, even if you’re swapping out mags for different loads in the same shells, the Stoner Rifle takes 7.62×51mm NATO rounds.  It’s a distinction which makes a _big_ difference when you’re reloading with any kinda chickenfeed you can scavenge in the field. 

“Stolen bird.  Poor maintenance,” one reader comments. 

“Stolen, hell!  _We_ probably _gave_ it to the local warlord--” 

“Who the hell _gives away_ state of the fucking art _Special Snowflake_ helos?” 

“Oh look, _that’s_ redacted.  Imagine that.  Somebody said hey, gotta spend out to save next year’s budget, there’s a cool six, seven million if you’re just parting out the targeting system--” There’s sound effects.  Hollow sucking drain noises.  Turkey calls.  Guys in this class are always pretty good at sound effects.  Big on duck calls.  Chicken noises. 

 Nobody else does cats like he does.  He earned the nickname on his own time--long story, but once he had it, it showed up on his ops too.  They’d tell him if anybody else managed the kind of enticing yowl that’d brought two enormous _Puma concolor_ males out of the brush at a booby-trapped pot farm up in the Klamath Mountains.  It’d been interesting three-way discussion on territory, until the panicky pot farmers ran into their own wired-up shotgun traps on the road out.  The local CAL FIRE guys had been pretty ticked off about that little crown fire, and that was _before_ the wind picked up to eighty em pee aitch and the charcoal spread for about two thousand acres. 

Otherwise, Cougar saves it up to scare the _crap_ out of annoying FNGs, Fucking New Guys.  There’s one of those at the back of the room, playing classroom assistant, making nervous walleyes every time somebody moves.  It makes everybody want to hit him or something. 

Cougar’s about ten seconds from shooting the light bulb flickering over the FNG’s head.  Blip-blip buzz buzz buzz blip blip.  The flicker makes some of the other guys twitchy too.  Hey, one of them might break first, shoot it out for him.  If there aren’t eighteen other loaded boots in here, he’ll eat the damn hat he isn’t allowed to wear.  Naaah, there’s a lot more than eighteen side pieces.  Some of these guys favor one in each boot shaft and something _special_ tucked inside the heel. 

“Maybe it was state of the art in _2007._ Guess what shape those things are in by the time the Company’s special little snowflakes knock off all the gloss?” 

“Or they banjaxed it on purpose.”  That’s a great big cheerful Navy SEAL nutcase, dark hair, likes to challenge everybody to go swimming a few miles at sea every morning.  Says Virginia beaches are bland compared to the kind of heavy surf he’s used to, fucking Hawaiian brat who brags on the tubes he’s used to seeing.  McGarrett says the local waters are just a light warmup, whets his appetite for breakfast.  When he’s not blowing things up, anyway.  There’s been some comments.  One of the instructors is apparently a former commander of his, and calls him on his bullshit now and then.  Not enough, in Cougar’s opinion. 

Cougar floats like a stone, lacking enough fat to keep him as buoyant as regular human beings, so anything done in the water is just plain constant work for him.  Everybody knows it.  They like to tease him about getting his paws wet.  He doesn’t bother to turn his head to glare hate at the SEAL, who was back on the beach taking _pictures_ by the time Cougar finished his own stretch of riptide laps, last time. 

“Here, have a nice banjaxed totally FUBARed helo, buddy, har de har.  Learned it all in the cartoons, man.  Bugs Bunny hands off TNT to Elmer Fudd-- yuck yuck yuck, _booom.”_  

“Little evidence of the kill shot, the craft exploded on impact,” read another classmate with his nose in the report. 

“That’s kinda sorta what you _want_ in a field op, right?  Plausible deniability.  Could be a manufacturing fault, even.  Hey, stray shot, total accident, he’s not even using an armor-piercing round.  C’mon, give _el Couuugaaaairr_ credit for doing that part right.” 

 _“El Puma,”_ corrects one of the snipers from Nevada, with that cold _bring it_ stare in his black eyes.  He's not anybody's pal with _La Raza_ ghetto hand gestures. His father’s family were Yoreme Indians from Sinaloa, his father served in the tunnel rats in ‘Nam, and his mother was Coyotero Apache from deep in the White Mountains Rez, and a combat nurse.  The guy barely made the height requirement but the local recruiter lied about it, knowing the guy was _born_ badass, no choices there.  Now the guy marathons the length of Death Valley for fun, trains by free-climbing the nastiest rocks in the Funeral Mountains.  In _July._   He is built of strings and elbows.  He’s also patient like a rattler.  He doesn’t even blink when somebody calls him Billy Jack, and then yowls in his face like silly Coyote, howling yakking laughter like a fool.  That guy knows all about Coyote's self-defeating tricks. He’ll just bitch them out on their faults with a vicious tongue until somebody loses their temper, and _then_ he’ll pull out his boot knives.  Around his boot guns, of course.  He likes his knives way too well, but he’s not a complete idiot.  Just a loco sonuvabitch. 

Reminds him of Roque, only Roque is a lot more sane.  The big black Loser telegraphs his intent loud and clear when he’s going to pop off on a team mate.  The foulest-mouthed Loser has even been known to pull a punch, now and then.  Also, a total sucker for puppies.  Who knew? 

Never say refresher training is worthless--it always gives Cougar a nice sense of perspective on the Losers as teammates. 

Somebody else says, “Yeah, yeah,” with snoring noises, in a broad New Yawk accent. 

Cougar looks over at the skinny marathon guy.  _Don’t do me any favors._  

 _You’re no fun,_ is the look he gets right back.  Hell hath no fury like a bored sniper. 

How they managed to bore a class of eighteen snipers is beyond reasonable belief, but the Army has done it here.  Maybe it’s a test:  Not enough adrenaline.  Will they all snore out?  Or shoot the light bulb first? 

Even the two semi-retired sergeants at the back look bored.  Those guys sat peeing in bottles for _fifteen days_ waiting for a shot into a prison, under the noses of nervous East German STASI police just after the Berlin Wall went down.  On the other hand, hey, nervous STASI might keep _anybody_ awake. 

That job did something to them, too.  They don’t work together any more.  They might drink everybody else under the table, but that’s it.  Nobody asks any more. They don’t talk much.  Couple of hand gestures, some disgusted looks, that’s all. 

Rumor has it that Command wants to assign snipers in three-man teams in Iraq and Afghanistan and parts east, more hands to hump in heavier gear for anti-materiel jobs.  Cougar could see the hopeful recruiters’ looks fading as the days ran on.  _Hell_ no.  He doesn’t want to be assigned to a _weekend cabin_ with any of these guys.  Not even at Lake Tahoe, with ski bunnies pouring across the casino sidewalks like fur-clad lemmings, eager to fling cash in anybody’s direction.  Cougar knows how that would end.  

When he’s always pulling girls off other guys, intentional or not, combined with the machismo reeking like bear piss in this place?  No, thank you.  Plus, he’s _not good_ about surprises.   Team him with somebody who actually manages to sneak up on him in a hotel room?  No.  

He knows nobody in this room would have _him_ on a bet.  Not after what happened to his last team.  Or the one before.  The Losers are titanium so far.  Maybe it’s the nickname.  Cougar hasn’t wanted to curse anybody else with that job. 

Not like he’s the only ghost ship in the room, either.  These guys are all survivors.  When things happen, _other folks_ die.  It’s not like any of them can boast about what’s happened to their teams _._   None of these guys ever hitched on with a spotter long-term, though they may have worked with dozens of good ones.   Every last one of them has lost, wounded, or got somebody on the same side killed for their sorry butts.  Or folks _supposed_ to be on the same site.  Some of them fragged their own spotter, or so rumor says. 

Cougar gets that sentiment.  He can stand it being spotted if the situation requires, if it’s Pooch or Clay working good scopes, laid out there next to him.  Anybody else, _hell no._  

CENTCOM wants to see if any of these lethal divas will finally pair up and play house.  Second-guessing the commanding political craziness has become a habit he doesn’t enjoy.  Training, hell.  Calling in several of these guys off very active jobs, but not calling in other guys already hooked in with an idle team, that’s a big fat tell. 

Billy Jack glares back at him.  He’s got serious bad ‘tude about the dumb local jarheads calling him faggot just because he’s little and dark.  They used to do it to Cougar all the time too.  But something’s changed, because now the stupid FNGS and jarheads and crapmeisters just go silent when they see Cougar.  He’s pretty sure it was Roque and Pooch and him happening to a few too many of the locals in bar fights.  Roque does love himself a good fight.  

Cougar doesn’t respond to the names anyway.  If he wants to pick up a big buff blue-eyed stud of a soldier at a poker game right under Billy Jack’s nose, making no excuses about it, he will, dammit.  And have a great queer-filled musclebound leave, fucking each other like bunnies for two weeks, parting with a big grin of happiness.  He’d do it again, every time, just to put that sour lemon look on Billy Jack’s dark disapproving face.  Poor guy doesn’t know what he’s missing. 

“How’d you estimate the windage at that altitude?  And what about the prop wash?  Roughly the same as ground experience, but multiplying for the greater rotor speed, maybe?”  That’s the infamous Technician in the bunch, picking holes.  He never allows himself to be rushed into a shot.  Never.  _He_ only did Company wet work for the very top agents.  These messy combat jobs were for all their sloppyjoe asses.  Leftovers when they wouldn’t take Company jobs, just because _they_ wouldn’t put up with the dregs of the Company’s incompetent handlers.  _Idiota._  

“Or did you use some kinda hip groovy jazz improv approach, instead of running through all those boring gunnery formulas like we’re supposed to?” says the Technician’s best spotter buddy, waving disco moves with his arms, and grinning at him.  Strange, the spotter isn’t on any team with the Technician, he never goes on jobs directly with the Technician.  They can stay buddies if they don’t work together.  Nobody’s called them on it yet. 

Which makes Cougar’s feet twitch in irritation, but he wasn’t about to let it show outside his boots.  Nobody got in this room by failing at math. 

“Get your Zen _on,_ man.  _Feel the target.  You are the helo mast--”_ More sound effects.  Yeah, school bullies are forever.  Who’d have thought. 

Next to Cougar, the marathon guy turns his chair around, staring dreamily at the buzzing fluorescent light bulb.  Billy Jack gets that look before he does something interesting with his bank shots in pool, too. 

“And you couldn’t have been sure about the lateral range, either.  This report just gives your distance estimates from the courtyard paving repeats and cast shadows.  Couldn’t even tell if you’d have enough projectile speed left to punch through the prop wash, could you?” 

“Worth a try, anyway,” says another classmate, likewise irritated.  Fireplug-shaped, weird sense of humor even for a sniper.  The guy starts flipping through the report, impatient, looking for something.  Hell, Clint Barton was bound to show up in their current case studies, which will annoy Barton even more than it’ll piss off the Technician.  Barton is a jazz-style improv fucking master, he does acrobatics during shots.  And don’t play pool with him.  Just don’t. 

The guy doesn’t even _belong_ in this sniper class, he’s a fucking _archer._ He just keeps taking out flying... _things.._. redacted... with that fucking high-tech bow thingie... redacted... of his, with special arrowheads with interesting capabilities... redacted, which damn, Cougar would have liked to see more... which is made by some hush-hush contractor...redacted... working for some urban group that handles these sorts of bizarre attacks... redacted... 

But Barton knows his guns too.  He was the first guy to try out an experimental cosine indicator on his scopes, for hill shooting.  He taught this same class sometimes to Marines and to Company personnel at Langley.  He said the dumb goon questions drive him berserk.  Eight bullets in the mag are a fucking _luxury._ Every shot counts, when you’ve only got one special fx arrowhead left to do the job.  Doesn’t _everyone_ shoot accurately during ordinary back flips? 

Come to think, with his weird _redacted_ experiences, Barton might be the only one who’d have some useful advice on this damn UFO wobbling in front of Cougar.  Might have to talk to him about it some time. 

Nobody else in _that_ class worships at the Barton shrine, though. 

 _“Worth a try?_   Hell no.  Dammit, look, with all respect, the Sergeant is down to his last eight rounds, he’s stuck out in the back of Bugfuck Camel-Spider Beyond with his ride crashed, no supplies, they’ve set all the local transport on _fire,_ and you really think _you’d_ waste any of it on a blue sky shot at the retreating belly of a hardened Special Ops helo?” 

That was from another one of the heavy survivalist sorts, one of those huge gorilla-suit hairy Ranger guys covered in scratches and skinny as hell, come right from cross-training baby SEALS and eating beetle grubs and shit.  Jim Ellison.  Twitchy all over, today.  But he speed-read through reports as well as ever. 

And yeah, there’s more sound effects.  Whooping chopper noises, siren noises.  Because yes indeed, they are all, where it really counts, truly six years old. 

Cougar glances over at the marathon guy.  Billy Jack makes a flea-crushing gesture of the fingers but no other indication he cares.  The exchange of deadpan glances is very satisfying. 

Then Billy Jack glances meaningfully at the light bulb buzzing away, and gives Cougar a gunbore-black stare.  _You losing it first, or me?_  

Cougar tilts his head enough to indicate the hairy beetle-eater, who is going on about lacking supplies.  He’s pretty sure Ellison will break long before they do, just reach up and crush the tube with a fist.  Possibly crush the entire lighting fixture, from the squinty look he’s got.  Jim hears dog whistles and car engines eight blocks away and doesn’t sleep very well.  He’s a menace in an ten-man tent in the field, and claims he’s much more relaxed there than in a city.  He challenges the big Hawaiian SEAL guy on swimming routines all the time.  Fucking water dogs, both of them. 

No supplies?  To Cougar, on that job, it just meant living on fried locusts and reptiles until they got stinking goat cheese bartered for with his last four NATO rounds.  Digging down twenty feet on the dried-up local waterhole to get water, just being friendly, helping out the villagers?  Sure, no problem.  Roque could run a Mississippi chain gang, if he ever retired from the Army.  

And pfehh, camel spiders were nothing. They gave a ragged bite, but the locals bet on fights staged with those.  It was the _other_ bugs really got to the Losers, especially bunking down anywhere down near the water.  Cougar personally dumped more vinegaroons and scorpions and spiders--and crap with moving joints that nobody has a proper scientific name for--out of his boots on that mission than he’s ever seen before. 

“What the hell is this SSE wind gust calculation?  _Puffs?_  A _guess?”_ says the Technician. 

“Hoodoo,” said another, rolling his eyes.  “Back to the Cougar hoodoo again.” 

There was no dignified response to that, so he fell back on smirking.  They were all used to it from him, and it’s a ridiculously small community.  Smirking, so useful for so many things. 

That’s when Ellison reaches up with one giant fist and crushes the light bulb in mid-buzz.  Cougar, among many others, starts clapping.  There’s whistles and catcalls.  Ellison just gets up, gives a little bow to his audience, brushes the glass off his seat, sits down again, and looks up attentively at the trainer, the very picture of an obedient pupil.  “Teacher, can I have a potty break?” he says.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Another shout-out is to the canon history of a Hawaii Five-0 character, Lt. Cmr. Steve McGarrett, as a Navy SEAL. While canon has it that he prefers to use close quarters combat with opponents, he may regard such methods as more appropriate for law enforcement purposes than his sniper techniques. The reconnaissance aspects of sniper training would be very appropriate for his promotion into Naval Intelligence.
> 
> Similarly, I had to toss in a reference to Clint Barton as a sniper. This story has to be happening before The Avengers movie, but not that far ahead of it. There are a lot of great AO3 stories about Clint in relation to the other Avengers characters. I have just a few of those bookmarked out of so many, but I like the dry wit in Clint/Coulson fics, and there’s some great ones where Clint is a side-character, with the story focused mainly on Tony Stark.
> 
> Yet another shoutout is the reference to Jim Ellison as a Ranger. Those folks who’ve been in fandom a bit longer will recognize him from the UPN and SYFY series The Sentinel. I would call myself a peripheral fan, as with many other fandoms, as I’ve read some really great Sentinel stories by writers I like in other fandoms as well. This would be pre-canon, before he ends up in Cascade, Washington. Considering the notion of twitchy soldiers always reminds me of this guy with the hyper-allergic senses.  
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sentinel_(TV_series)
> 
> AO3 writer storm_petrel provides great Jensen meandering-voice, helpful military acronyms, and fun words such as “Fuckitscoldistan”, to which I can only bow in tribute. Plus Jensen’s sister. Plus Roque wrangling sharks with a KA-BAR, as you do.  
> http://archiveofourown.org/works/319548


	3. Sign Language for Dummies

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Yeah, this is how you do it... in several meanings of the phrase. It is not part of established canon that Cougar speaks any of the various sign languages, or that he reads lips, but these are very useful skills for snipers. I just added deaf folks among his family members on a whim of my own, as I like works of inclusion that show all kinds of folks as part of society, not just the able-bodied.

Of course Cougar knows what _mierda_ he’s in for with his fellow snipers if he makes this ridiculously simple shot.  If it ever gets into a report.  If _anybody_ ever gets to see the pictures on this silly pie pan thing wobbling beyond Pooch’s helo.  He changes scopes, watching it. 

The uneven whining noise is starting to buzz in his molars.  Annoying. 

He watches the disk’s spin for a count of thirty, timing the dark-colored markings that might be some kind of intakes.  It’s spinning about forty em pee aitch, which seems slow if that’s what supports the disk as an airfoil like a Frisbee.  ‘Hit the intake’ is always a good plan on unknown craft.  Pooch discussed that with him over many long bar visits, laying out _exactly_ what he should look for.  Sketches got scratched out on bar napkins. 

Pooch is into the details when it comes to combat shots at vehicles, ships, aircraft, submarines, tiger sharks, screaming Mongolian horsemen, hippos, Somali pirates on rubber Zodiac rafts, raiding Tuareg tribesmen on camels, saltwater crocodiles, and the occasional nosey warthog.  

Pooch says he still dreams about those hog tusks right in his face, first thing in the morning.  And the smell.  He told Cougar once they don’t react well to a 9mm round up the snoot. 

Cougar replied solemnly that he’d take the Pooch’s word on that.  Well, he _was_ pretty drunk. 

Pooch admitted he probably shouldn’t have got that blotto in the Congolese bush.  Waking up hungover in the bush is bad, just counting the ants.  It really could have been that aging leopard with bad teeth who was taking goats and children, before a couple of the local park rangers tracked it down.  Those guys had interesting stories. 

Also, the Pooch hates clowns.  There can be lengthy, incoherent, hysterically funny discussions on clowns, if the Pooch has drunk enough bad local hooch.  He never gets like that on normal stuff like vodka or Jack or tequila.  So, how to take out clowns, all kinds. 

Just not UFOs. 

Who the hell expects UFOs? 

UFOs, really? 

That’s why they’re called _unidentified._  

Non-English marks, too.  Sweet.  Somebody’s going to ask him about those.  

He’s trying to estimate the craft’s trajectory if it continues on its current flight path.  The pie pan is dropping lower behind Pooch’s helo now, heading to crash on the balds and jagged ridges behind them all if it doesn’t pull up instantly.  But helping it out too soon, by killing it dead in the air, might drop it like a cream pie joke and bring it down flat on Roque. Or on himself.  So he’s counting, letting its possible flight path sweep on past their positions, before he picks his shot. 

He knows the nice people in lab coats will ask how he _feels about it._ Cougar just smiles in his head, imagining his teammates answering that.  Snipers spend a lot of time amusing themselves.  _Silently._  Lots of things seem funny these days, things which didn’t use to amuse him so much. 

Pooch is still screaming, interrupting Roque.  “Shoot it, shoot it--” 

“It hasn’t _done_ anything to us yet,” Clay points out, which gets him all of five seconds of disbelief. 

“Shoot it before it does!”   There you have it:  Roque’s philosophy in a nutshell. 

The hysteria is even worse down the slope from Cougar’s hide.  The preacher is waving his purple-striped arms like he’s on a flag team.  His thick young guards prove they aren’t combat veterans at all.  Not like the grinning ancient guys in the village, who are leisurely picking their shots at Pooch’s helo and also watching the piepan, too.  No, the preacher’s guards down in the compound are running around like stirred ants, screaming and shooting so wildly at things in the sky that some of the stuff is actually pattering down around Cougar, spraying all over the slopes.  

_“...Going to get a big dish of beef chow mein....”_  

An RPG-7 round drops into a pine tree a thousand yards away and blows up IEDs buried in the road, starting an instant fire in the dry carpet of needles.  

These Afghan pines are dry.  They’re always dry, even at this altitude.  As Roque put it, when this armpit of Hell gets to _one hundred fucking fourteen_ summer degrees Fahrenheit, things get fucking _damned_ dry.  A crown fire can run a thousand yards in five minutes, easy.  

The fire finally makes the old guys start yelling, furious.  Great, now everybody’s hysterical. 

_“...Werewolves of London, Ahwooooo! Huh!”_  

The disk isn’t pulling up.  It’s just wobbling unsteadily in flight, destined for a messy end in a poppy terrace at the bottom of a black rock face about hundred and fifty feet high, unless something changes.  The air shimmers like a mirage there.  The dark cliff is heating up fast in full sun, generating crazy air currents. 

It’s a mercy, really, changing things, giving the pilot something _new_ to do with their momentum. 

Cougar times his heartbeat, empties his lungs, and pulls the trigger gently.  And leading the target, timing the heartbeat, squeezing the next shot.  Then a third hit on the same aleph-looking mark.  Done:  The spinning dark mark explodes in his scope. 

The thing shreds silver covering in long foil strips, tumbles upside down briefly, veers into a steep right-angle banking turn, misses the rocks entirely.  Wobbles, skips around like a stone on a pond.  

Instead of crashing right off, it sinks into a long run over the valley floor, shears off a long track of pine tree tops in the trough of the valley.  It finally comes to rest in a smoking mess in a straw-yellow meadow at least three klicks away.  All right, three and a half, which is pretty good.  Further than he expected.  He twitches the gun and its sight back to village business. 

Pooch pulls up the helo, hovers over Roque’s position, beautiful touch-and-go, he’s down for less than thirty seconds and they’re off again, in spite of the gunfire coming at them from the village.  

That’s where the old mujahadeen are aiming from, and they’ve had thirty years of fighting the Russians to practice hitting things on these slopes.  They’d be decent shots if their guns weren’t beat to death.   They’ll be aiming at Cougar’s position too the instant the helo betrays it.  The comm is full of Pooch and Roque yelling at each other when the singer interrupts them again. 

_“Ahhwooooo... Werewolves of London, Huh!  Draw blood!...”_  

“Crappety crispy fried shit,” Clay says on the comm, in measured tones.  “With ketchup.” 

“You’re making me hungry!” Pooch complains. 

“Kaibab cow clappers covered with crunchy crap,” Clay says. 

“You know that’s _weird,_ right?  The whole matching first-letter thingie you always do when you’re timing a goddamn shot--” 

“Alliteration, Pooch, it’s called _alliteration--”_ Roque can surprise you, he really can. 

The young guys down in the compound are still hysterical, but some of them are racing for their beatup old trucks.  They’re loading up some more heavy stuff from out of the huts--who fucking knew that kind of artillery was in there?  Really, Intel on this place missed _that?_ \-- and they haul shoulder-mounted rockets up in the open truckbeds.  Cougar only knocks out three of those before it’s time to pack things up and grab his brass.  No trace left behind, no sir. 

_“...Ahhwooooo... Werewolves of London...”_  

Clay’s bullets rattat into the walls of the compound, walk along the trucks, and start zigzagging across the pallet loads.  Cougar can see the vapor trails, the very slight disturbance of air like tracers, a faint mirage track for each one.  It doesn’t matter if Clay’s aim or his grip or his stance wobbles, there’s plenty of loaded truck trailers and engine blocks to shoot.  Nothing explodes, sadly.  The rounds don’t appear to be doing anything besides punching holes in the sheet wrap, but it drives the old guys there back under cover. 

Pooch jinks weirdly again.  By the time he drops the helo down within eight feet of the rock at Cougar’s position, the sniper is already leaping for the landing skids.  Shots ping off the helo. 

By the time Roque has grabbed Cougar’s pack straps, just for extra security, they’re already a klick down the valley, two hundred feet up, and rising fast.  Cougar hangs onto his hat and the door.  The gun’s sling thrums hard at his shoulder.  Roque drags him inside like he’s a rag doll, gun and all, while Clay slams the cabin door shut. 

Roque gives him a shake, growling.  Cougar hangs in his grip.  He just tilts the hat brim, politely looking up.  Dignity, man. 

Roque flinches, reminded how Cougar can twirl round on himself like a fucking tomcat in a bathtub, and those are steel-toed boots.  He’s got kicked because Cougar is not a _nice_ drunk.  Well, neither is Roque, so that’s fair.   Roque dumps him off on his own feet with a bang of boot heels on the helo decking. 

Roque is still panting hard.  “You shot a goddamn UFO.” 

“You shot down a _UFO_.  Cougar, you _shot down_ a UFO--” Pooch keeps repeating it. 

Cougar shrugs.  In his roster of difficult technical shots, this is not in the top hundred.  Not even the top two hundred.  He still has his hat, after all. 

It also didn’t shut down the irritating voice on the comm at all. 

_“...I saw a werewolf with a Chinese menu in his hand...”_  

“Not a kill shot,” Cougar says. 

Roque makes a primeval jungle sort of noise and smacks him on the shoulder, hard.  _Ow._  

Clay, behind him, starts to laugh.  Then they’re all laughing, except Cougar. 

_“...Walking through the streets of Soho in the rain_

_He was looking for the place called Lee Ho Fook's,_

_Going to get a big dish of beef chow mein....”_ the voice stutters in and out, comm link failing. 

“I’ll give you some goddamn fucking _Fooks,_ you bastard, you’re supposed to be dead!” Roque roars into his com.

 “Maybe we don’t want him dead,” Clay says. 

“Why the fuck not!” 

“Maybe he’s a little gray alien, and we want to ask a few questions, hey?” 

Roque gives the word _fuck_ about six different grammar functions.  He thinks the diskie pilot planned those wacko skipping maneuvers, rather than crediting Cougar’s shot. 

Well, it’s possible. 

Cougar tips down his hat, ignoring it.  Too much work to override all the “ _fucked up little gray alien fucking fucker of an alien!”_ on the comm.  He slides out of his pack straps. 

“He’s some kinda _alien_ all right.  But he’s singing a really old pop song, in English, when he’s flying around in... that thing?” Pooch mutters, rolling the helo so Cougar can see straight down out the window.  So can Clay, and Roque. 

By then, they’re looking down at smoke, mostly from the trees broken by the craft.  The damn thing has scattered debris in its wake, but it’s still upright and it held together at impact better than most fallen aircraft.  The disk shows different layers peeled open, and some smoking plumbing parts strewn behind it like robot intestines.  Cougar gets his gun up, gets the camera-scope going on pictures. 

There’s also a door opening gaping on one side, and what looks like a biped in BDUs spilled out of it, lying on the ground.  Lying on his back, gesturing at them. 

“Fucking _waving_ at us--” Roque says. 

“ASL signs.” Cougar squints down. 

“Not one of the other languages?” Clay says. 

“No.” 

“What the fuck--” 

_“...I want to meet his tailor,”_ Cougar says, watching the big, exaggerated gestures.  The guy is signing it large for them, for the eyes hovering noisily up in the sky above him. 

“He’s signing the _song lyrics?”_ Clay is laughing again. 

“How the hell would _you_ know sign language?” Roque demands. 

“Roque.  You know he’s got deaf sisters,” Clay says, annoyed. 

“I knew that.  I just didn’t know deaf _Mexican_ girls would learn _American_ sign language.” 

“Three sign languages,” Cougar says, still watching.  “And they read lips a little.”  He doesn’t bother to clarify that it’s only one sister and two of the various cousins who are actually deaf.  The rest of the family has just got in the habit of signing all the time.  It’s useful for many of the jobs in the family’s history, including Cougar’s own work as a sniper. 

But the girls going after French signing practice--or the local guys who did it--well, that was still a nightmare. 

Clay sighs noisily into his comm.  “Take us down, Pooch, we’re picking up that pilot and bombing the crap out of that craft before the locals start taking it apart.” 

“And how the hell do we know _what_ we’re blowing up if we do?  What if it’s got fissionables on board?” Pooch argues. 

“He can _tell_ us that, if we can get him up in one piece.  We don’t have time to rig up a cargo hook to sling that craft.”  Clay has taken the mag out of Cougar’s anti-materiel gun and set the rifle aside on the cabin floor, but the barrel will be too hot to clean it yet.  Besides, he probably wants Cougar to reload and have the M82 ready to go when they set down to look at the saucer craft. 

Pooch grunts.  “Even if we _had_ time, just no.  You keep forgetting this is not some damn Black Hawk or a Chinook or even a decent old Huey.  Oh no, not lucky us.  _This_ thing is just an old tired French Gazelle shit out by the Iraqis before the damn Paki insurgents got it.  I _know_ this damn thing hasn’t had a rotor adjustment for years, shaking my bones numb here.  And the way it’s drinking fuel now under all your fat asses, we’ll be lucky to make it back fifty klicks to Chora.  Forget making it out to Kandahar.” 

“Not mine,” Cougar mutters. 

“Hell no, _your_ weight is all in your damn guns and ammo, funny how that’s outweighing the rest of us!” Pooch complains. 

“All those RPG-7s.”  Meaning, again, _not mine._  

Roque stole all those boxes of confiscated Russian grenades-onna-stick stuffed into the back of the helo, unbalancing the bird.  Cougar sniffs. They may be great when they’re wired up as bombs and incendiaries, but they’re not terribly accurate as ammunition. 

Pooch growls, “Yeah, I _know._ Believe me, I _know.”_  

“Cougar, you better cut out that passive-aggressive shit before I make you,” Roque growls.   “Pooch, we gotta get a new ride anyway, theft reports ’d be out by now.  Gotta pick up some other kinda transport if we’re taking along that goddamn _alien_ down there.  Too many desk jockeys and spooks in Kandahar got nothin’ better to do but ask questions.” 

“What, you wanna try riding the _train_ outta here?  Head out east to sweet-talk Paki border guards?  Maybe we could find us some nice fat lady’s _hijab_ to stuff you into, Roque, cover up your badass mofo face.” 

“Enough of the sweet talk, I’m getting diabetes,” Clay says. 

“That’s just ‘cause you drink too much,” Pooch snaps. 

Roque gives a whistle, _whooooo._   “That man _seriously_ needs his Jolene fix.” 

“I _know,_ believe me,” Clay says. 

The UFO pilot lying on the ground, it turns out, is a blonde strapping six-foot-plus human.  Or human-looking.  He’s in broken glasses, wearing raggedy BDUs with a torn name tag and dented ID tags.  He has no boots, his feet are crusted with blood and dirt.  And he is, as Pooch puts it, _tripping balls._ He shades his eyes, lying there looking up at them, and waves happily.  He gurgles nonsense at them, repeating bits of the song.  As before, on the comm, he is singing with an American accent. 

As they’ve all known Russian mobsters with Etonian accents, Iranians who do Detroit-style rap, and Armenian gun runners who spoke decent ghetto Spanglish from either Texas or Los Angeles, this small detail doesn’t convince Cougar that what they’ve got actually is _what it looks like._  

_What it looks like_ they’ve got is an Army corporal stoned out of his gourd after stealing, and crashing, somebody’s UFO. 

Somebody who is going to come looking for it. 

Somebody who’s not going to be happy to find it all blown to bits by American military ordinance such as the anti-personnel NATO mags in his backpack.  Or the .50 caliber BMG anti-materiel rounds the M82 has already fired into those trucks. 

So now they’ll all agree, gee whiz, thank God that Roque stole that nice big load of Russian-made RPG-7s at that last warehouse before they took the chopper.  Yeah, he claims it was just to keep his hand in, the big liar.  He just gets off on stealing ordnance and then using it instead of the lawful stuff issued to them, so nobody can tell who did it.  Yeah, just being a good example for baby black ops FNGs, dropping his voice really low and _growling_ at ‘em. 

He cheats at cards, too. 

Fortunately, Cougar cheats better.  He’s done some card tricks in his time, he had bored sisters to keep entertained.  Anything was better than more _lessons_ with all those hip French-signing guys who take off whenever Cougar shows up.  Nobody needs that kind of fuss, making Mother and Grandmother worry like that about the girls.  Or making _him_ homicidal. 

“Hi gorgeous, what’s your name?” the stranger on the ground says in ASL, hands moving in big open careful gestures.  Then he speaks with his voice, falling into a terrible, awful, flat American accent.  “Como estas, mi llama es Jensen.” 

Cougar signs back at him, slowly and clearly, that he will look at the injuries, let him know if something hurts when he moves it.  He hasn’t missed the fact that, if he’s actually handling an alien, with _alien cooties,_ then he’s doing it alone.  Nobody else is in touching or breathing range.  Nice, how much they trust Cougar and his reflexes, if the alien tries to grab him. 

“Que es tu llama?” the guy asks.  It’s horrible grade-school Midwestern Spanish at its worst. 

Cougar ignores it.  He resists the temptation to respond that a llama is a pack animal from Peru raised for wool, which also spits and bites.  Bites hard, in his personal experience.  Almost as bad as camels.  Maybe another time. 

Cougar pats him down rapidly for weapons, peels open the dirty clothes, checks his ribs. 

The stranger bats sloppily at Cougar’s arms, grinning.  “What, don’t I even get dinner before you have your wicked way with me, sweetheart?  Hey, not complaining, but aren’t things moving awfully fast here?  You’re really furry under all that too, aren’t you?  What’s your name, beautiful?” 

“Calmaté,” Cougar tells him absently.  “No, not me.  Calmaté, idiota--calm down.” 

But he doesn’t, of course.  The man starts singing again.  Making up new verses.  Something about werewolves biting Spanish _gitanas_ and dragging their crazy flamenco moves into all the tango clubs in London, and setting off riots.  Perhaps he is thinking of football riots by rival footie gangs in the UK. 

Cougar had not found many tango dancers in London, riotous or otherwise.  Most of them were older, on the plump side, dignified about the subtleties.  The ladies were not exactly fired up about Cubano or Argentine styles when Cougar tried it.  Too athletic. 

He observed far more tango in Finland.  Depressed, gloomy Finnish tango, of course.  Athletic, though.  Mostly suicidal, precise, with a few moments of spastic flailing, but not exactly riotous.  He had some wildly inventive erotic encounters too, but they were not passionately abandoned either.  Just nice for teaching him new techniques. 

He’s not sure why Jensen reminds him of the dancing Finns.  Not just his gangly size, or his coloring.  Something about his carefully large sign gestures, the precision there.  But the man is far too animated for a Finn, even for the crazed backpackers and free-climbers.  The women climbers were amazing.  Also very good precise technical climbers.  Good teachers, if one had the sense to listen. 

He likes learning things from women.  Of course they see it, too.  Cougar sits back and waits, like any decent sniper, and he watches.  He listens.  He learned long ago from his sisters that most women find this surprising in any man who carries himself with properly arrogant tango posture.  But tango requires finesse, too, not just undeserved attitude. 

Cougar’s favorite dance pairs show it as a disciplined fire, a shaped charge burning in through armor, because there is something _worth defending_ inside that armor.   It is not just a campfire flaring up at every breath of wind.  But neither is it an empty ballroom display of bird feathers jerking around perfectly to a metronome.  Not many women seem to appreciate the coolness of machismo that doesn’t shout, doesn’t have to get trashed first, doesn’t _need_ to swagger. 

Disappointing, to find out that he earned a lot more screaming inflamed passion from crowds of women if he swaggered into a Texas bar and rode a mechanical bull, shirtless, for a four minute round with no hands.  Six minutes got him wet panties slung in his face and money waved at him.  He didn’t even need it to be ladies’ night.  _Far_ easier than decent tango. 

The Texan ladies stuffed money into his underpants and bought him as much as he cared to drink, which was nice, and it also made Roque get that squinty look, like he was sucking lemons. 

Admittedly, Cougar was jailbait until he made Sergeant; still is, if he goes clean-shaven.  This has some mysterious appeal of its own, which he has always been happy to exploit.  Then, at nineteen, on a three-month mission, his hair grew out and... _magic._   Suddenly he was catnip in every bar he visited.  Back stateside, drunken gals threw him down and mauled him shamelessly in public.  It’s never failed him since.  He hasn’t _done_ anything to be a chick magnet.  Well, aside from getting cleaned up first.  Apparently that’s a novel experience for lots of women in Texas bars.  He wasn’t putting on a _show_ about it, no matter what Roque and Pooch claim. 

But local risks ran high too. After successful bullrides, Cougar might get beat up by small town Texas sheriffs at the slightest excuse, even during Mardi Gras, when the girls started yelling the count out the windows with each orgasm he provided to their sorority sisters--it’s not like they were making it difficult to do.  But attitude from sheriff’s deputies happened anyway, regardless of the provocations, in such towns.  Sad, after the excitement of wrestling with all that leather and brass, to learn firsthand how many of them really do suffer from very small dicks.  He was always polite about what he found under the briefs.  Who needs to mock this when they mock themselves harder? 

Roque claims Cougar has pull just because he has no standards.  Claims he will knock boots with _anything,_ animal, mineral, or vegetable.  This is not the case.  Cougar just appreciates a wider aesthetic than the Captain does.  He’s not so hardened into the ridiculously uptight ideals of his Catholic school years as other men.  Cougar will wiggle his brows at Roque and murmur, _“Ghetto booty!”_ and slide happily out of his seat to pursue the evening’s offerings, whatever they might be. 

After all, why are all the absurd rules applied to the shapes of girls, when they all are so marvelous?  He loves the plush feel of the plump breasts of angry tattooed cholo gals in their fatigue pants and crucifix necklaces, or the muscular snap and grind of the muscled buttocks of the marathon runners and free climbers, and the elegant lines and swan necks of the fashionistas, and the angular severity of the myopic scholars who like to discuss Cervantes and argue with fierce intellectual honesty about Garcia Lorca with him, all those girls who are naturally thin, and despair over it--and why were they ever taught to feel so miserable?  Their individual faults are so odd and endearing, too.  The freckles, the crooked toes, the uneven proportions, the odd stuttering yelp when a girl comes. 

Really, it is a service, even in scary conservative towns, to take his time at it, patiently helping girls of all shapes and sizes find out what amazing sensations are available to them with a considerate lover.  Because he gets plenty, he can be relaxed about the whole thing; he doesn’t feel any great need to push beyond petting the nervous ones.  He just tries to pay proper attention to whoever’s kissing him at the time.  Especially when there’s more than one.  It’s only courteous.  Women are nice.  Most of them like to feed him in the morning, too, and decent home-cooking is a pearl beyond any price when he’s on the road. 

He enjoys their company, their scents, brushing their hair, feeling all that wonderful skin when he gives a massage to those smooth delicious ribbons of muscle.  If he really needed to get _raunchy,_ he wasn’t going to ask frightened young girls for help they don’t know how to give him. 

For that, he’d wait to get to a decent-sized city, where enough of the gay bars were still about anonymous hookups and displays of strength.  The blocky shapes and heavy bones help him for awhile, but it’s always too static.  It’s not the kind of field endurance that he respects, that gives him an instant hunger for more.  Sometimes he pushes himself, waits too long, and he’s not careful enough about sex with men; picking up hepatitis in Lagos might have been the food there, not the policemen he picked up, but it was still a helluva scare.  He got lucky, not having to out himself to Clay about how he got it.  

It’s even luckier he hasn’t tested positive on AIDS so far, which Roque is always going on about.  “Put a sock on it, fucker!” Roque yelled every time he left a bar with someone he’d snagged out from under Roque’s oblivious nose.  Roque doesn’t notice a woman is attractive until Cougar has coaxed it from her, got her to present herself as a beauty, to _demand_ the attention as a desirable woman. 

But getting in trouble with small town cops, fighting guys in bars with poor hand-to-hand skills, trying not to hurt them too badly, that gets old.  Even Roque gets tired of that.  Roque gave Clay a long list of city destinations to avoid once it was time for tickets for stateside.  That would skip a lot of after-hours hostility.  No Great Circle routes to small towns in Alaska or the Great White North of Canada, either.  Roque tended to freak out the bush pilots somehow, which you’d think would be pretty hard to do.  Something about all the knives. 

Pooch is rooting for the Midwest, on their next leave.  Pooch wants them all to go visit his enamorata’s town.  God only knew what had rotted out his last brain cell to let him think of crossing the Losers with the law-abiding church-going citizens of Jolene’s small town Ohio, or over in Illinois, at her mother’s home town.  There are steeples and tidy clapboard houses with green lawns in the pictures. 

Cougar always mentally overlaid those pictures with Consequences:  Flames spraying off the pointy steeple tips, houses flattened and smoking, crumpled freeway bridges, wrecked rail overpasses, and screaming fire trucks racing past.  He can’t help it.  That’s how the Losers leave most places.  Well, except the ones which don’t _have_ any emergency services to respond. 

Clay _tries_ to be careful where he plops them down, but they really are a force of chaos, even when they’re just after some peace and quiet. 

Well, until the Losers have to flee Jolene’s town, one way or another, it would be fun bull-riding in the local bars.  Pooch swears there’s enough mechanical bulls in country bars and enough neglected women to keep Cougar busy for a week.  Unlikely, Cougar thinks, but hey, two-three days will be a nice start on vacation.  A quiet stateside vacation, eating anything they want, and drinking-- well, not everything in sight, not like they used to. 

Clay has forbidden the tequila challenges they used to do.  He’s started up a bail money fund, fed by forfeits every time they show up drunk on base, drunk in uniform, drunk during semi-official functions such as weddings, if they blow something up accidentally on-base or on purpose off-base, if they make a monkey of some incompetent nephew of the brass, or if they piss off the base commander.  Or all of the above.  Roque is paying off forfeits all the time.  He drinks too much.  So does Clay. 

Last time, besides paying _his_ part of the forfeit, as part of the deal to appease the base commander, Cougar had to do some specialized culling.  As their team’s designated sharpshooter, he had to go out in that Texas monsoon heat--on his own time no less--and knock down the base’s razorback population.  It tickled the commander’s sense of humor, he was cracking jokes about taking out all the hogs, as one of the _Marine_ sniper schools uses a hog-headed soldier for its insignia. 

The sprawling empty back end of a lot of bases are also wildlife reserves.  But half-Italian feral pigs don’t belong.  They overbreed their turf.  They shovel everything all to hell like insane little bulldozers run amuck, grubbing the hell out of the streams and messing up all kinds of endangered crap like snails and frogs, not just the trout. 

The javelinas were just additional pain.  Technically, collared peccaries, aka stink pigs.  Soldiers went survival training out there near the swamps for years, so the animals had the whole human thing taped.  Those sows are wily as hell about guys wearing camo paint, guys who _thought_ they knew how to hunt.  Start shooting their piglets and those mommas turned _mean._   Their tusks may not show like the boars, but they bite.  They bit up a lot of guys who couldn’t go up a tree fast enough.  Sometimes guys didn’t pick a big enough tree, either.  The pigs were all wise on how to _hurt_ humans. 

It was clear from all the scars on the animals that not enough hunters can distinguish a stinking-pig collared peccary from a feral domestic razorback sow from a real European wild boar living up to its potential at four hundred fast-moving pounds.  Also, very few shooters could time that perfect 90-degree angle needed to hit a razorback in the brain, as everything else glanced right off that thick skull and just _pissed them off._  

Pooch still gives him a hard time about it, but the pilot wasn’t even _there._   Since Pooch hadn’t been involved in ticking off the base commander, _he_ went off visiting his girlfriend Jolene while _they_ got to nurse mosquito and pig bites.  As the team’s knife specialist, Roque got to do the hanging and cleaning and hauling the carcasses out, while Clay played cook at their base camp.  Roque complained how often he had to drive out to the meat locker, as if he’s never seen somebody work at it who used to _hunt for a living._   In drier, tougher terrain, too; the base’s back fields near the swamps were so pig-infested Cougar couldn’t turn around without cutting tracks.  It cost Cougar two weeks leave, three fucking boxes of huge ammo, a great dislike for Clay’s tasteless gringo-style pulled pork, and a jagged tusk-slash on his shin that still hurts when it’s about to rain.  It hurts now, squatting like this for so long. 

What _was_ Pooch thinking? 

Pooch also claims his lady Jolene would drag into those midwestern bars every single gal she knew from all the hospitals where she’d ever worked, just to hassle Cougar and Pooch properly.  Probably Jolene’s friends will be full of evil ideas, which may have to be managed.  Otherwise Clay may get himself tangled up in another romance that involves flying golf irons, failing brakes, car bombs, false arrests, smoke bombs, stink bombs, and booby traps made of emergency flares.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> RE: Clay uttering alliterative remarks as he focuses on a tough shot is entirely made up, not in canon or fanon that I'm aware of. Truth be told, this is complete crack on my part. I don't know of anything in canon to support it. I think the Muse decided it would be funny and unlikely that Clay would be the high school rapper instead of Roque. Plus, just another annoying thing the Losers have to live with, and don't mention to other folks.
> 
> The story El Tango has fabulous Jensen. It was by joidianne4eva as a gift for my beta reader, cougars_catnip, so of course I had to toss in a tribute to this whole idea.  
> http://archiveofourown.org/works/446890  
> There’s other fics are convincing when they say Cougar is too serious, too dignified, just not the trivial dancing-fool sort of guy. Ahh, but this is what convinced me that Cougar has Standards, in dance as in everything else. 
> 
> Also, yes, there really are Finnish tango contests which are very popular. I believe I first learned that from an NPR story, but no link, sorry. There’s just an unavailable audio link from 1996 with All Things Considered. Finnish style is a serious variant from the classic origins. I’m not sure the word depressed is adequate to describe this much angst.  
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finnish_tango
> 
> ETA: I am informed that wild pig is not edible anyway, the meat is full of parasitic worms, and it takes a couple of generations of breeding them in captivity to get rid of the parasite problems. This suggests that Clay's dinners of bland pulled pork were cooked from regular domestic sources, and therefore an extra annoyance to his teammates who can't use the wild meat. This sounds so typically Clay-liked that I would not be at all surprised.  
> My source was also telling me that four-gauge shotguns are to be preferred for shooting the large wild pig you find in the Australian bush, as regular twelve-gauge won't do it to kill the animal. I am informed that American pigs tend to be smaller, so maybe a twelve-gauge might work. Using a four-gauge would be a rare event as those guns are generally vehicle-mounted rather than carried into the bush by very large human hunters. However, if they are Jensen or Thor-sized, exercising due caution to avoid breaking their shoulders with the recoil, apparently this trick is possible. If you are wondering whether you trust any of this information--"Really, is any of this serious, for reals? Are those Aussies just dissing our American pigs or what?"-- then you are in the correct mindset to appreciate the kind of stories these guys in the Losers will tell you over card games.  
> Also, "hunting wild boar" has its own entry in Wikipedia, and skepticism is often the correct attitude to bring to entries there as well.


	4. Jake Jensen, Alien

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jake can be a strange guy. Truth be told, so are the rest of them. Guess that's why they work so well as a team?  
> Also, if you notice Clay keeps asking the same question different ways, you've noticed one method of extracting some actual answers, eventually.
> 
> And here's where we start to hear about the handiwork of our Bad Guys, Wade and Max.  
> ETA a more explicit note about how such untrusting guys would check on Jake Jensen as far as they were able. Of course, given that Jake's quite a hacker, there might not be much in the records to look up, would there?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Same warnings as for the beginning of the series -- gratuitous swearing, violence, and bad attitude.

Bull-riding and wrangling razorbacks and handling angry Texas deputies is _simple_ compared to playing cabin door gunner with Pooch at the controls of a rusty old French helo dodging air bursts from pissed-off old mujahideen forces.  Or, in future, maybe Paki security forces.  He’s not looking forward to the next few legs of the journey out of country.  Hauling along a guy whose feet are messed up is a much bigger task. 

It’s not like they can just buzz into Kandahar and dump him.  They’re not even supposed to be out here.  Hell, he might not be, either. Clay says somebody at CENTCOM kinda vouched for the guy, but admitted that Jensen's time in General Ross's dedicated Spec Ops units turned him truly odd. Clay said Ross's command would make anybody crazy, which is blunter truth than CENTCOM usually gets spoken to them. Apparently Clay's contact complained about Jensen's faults and motormouth weirdness until Pooch's scratchy radio signal failed. Now the guy is singing, and signing, something about werewolves biting pirates now.   “Piratas, right?” he says, adding the ASL sign.

“Sì, piratas.”  Cougar dodges a waving hand, reaches in for the chain at the guy’s neck. 

The BDU pocket label matches the ID tags.  If he’s an alien, he’s got the regular human collection of limbs and fingers and toes and inoculation scars and his meat tag tattooed on his ribs under one arm.  He’s got some kind of sticky green oil dribbled on his enormous hands and down his gangling long legs, he’s got lots of bruises and cuts, old and new, and he’s wearing ridiculously nonstandard blue polyester boxers printed with the red Superman logo.

He’s also got lots of tiny burn scars and nicks on his fingertips, which reminds Cougar of the soldering marks he’s seen on the hands of comm techs. 

After a hasty check for pulse and broken ribs, he rolls the man onto his side and checks for more cuts hidden in the BDUs, then over on the other side, with absolutely loopy brain-addled ‘cooperation’ from the patient that makes it all harder.  Huge greasy flappy hands are everywhere in the way, slowing him down.

Cougar is very aware of the crackling sound of fire taking light in the dry grass not far away.

Finally Cougar snaps into the comm, “Unarmed.  Hiked barefoot on rocks.  One shin bone may be cracked, a cut on the other ankle needs stitches.  Concussed.  His tags say Jacob Jensen.”

“Yes sir, that’s my name, my moniker, my nom de guerre, my mother’s inexplicable whim--but you can call me Corporal Fucking Shut Up Jensen, like all the other assholes do.  Now please don’t forget, that’s social security number--” and he reels off the number on the tags.

“Liked him better when he was singing,” Pooch says from inside the bird.

Roque growls.  He’s taken a hasty latrine stop already, so now _he’s_ ready to leave.  He’s walking around on watch, muttering to hurry up.  Clay is stripping branches off a couple of sapling pines he’s sawn down, in shameful abuse of a perfectly good knife that he won off Roque in a card game a month ago.  He likes to rub it in like that. 

“Get it on, girls, we got a nice rooster of dust coming up the valley,” Roque says, like the fire from the crash doesn’t set off any ticking clocks for him.  Well, maybe Roque never fought fires in oily chaparral that can boom a hundred feet up-canyon in one lick, and explodes burnt cacti like shrapnel, just for shits and giggles.  Nothing quite like getting raw pads of _nopales_ peppered into your ass like buckshot, thorns and all.

The villagers all know what that big dirty plume in the sky means.  Talk about a contact high--the smoke alone will knock you on your ass, smiling, until you get burnt alive.  Those poppy terraces are dryland farming, like wheat.  Nobody has a pump to bring water up from the river.  The village women and children haul up their water in jugs and buckets on yokes, as if nobody has ever bothered to sort out some waterworks for them while at home from their meetings with insurgents.  Or else all the multiple different forces have knocked down whatever piping the locals attempted to build, and it’s happened so many times they’ve given up.  There had been a Western-style pump in a little tin shed, bombed into a bit of slag.

It’ll be interesting to see if the preacher gets his truck caravan loaded up with local folks, or if he just hauls ass to save those pallets.

Pooch is handing over a loose blanket and cable ties connected in long strings, all scavenged from the emergency box.  Pooch is a nut about adding long cable ties to the emergency boxes.  Amazing how often they’re needed.  But damned if anybody’s going to admit Pooch might be right.  Sets a bad precedent, admitting things like that.

“Good, strap him up and let’s go.  Ask him about the craft,” Clay says to Cougar.

“Oh, bomb the fuck out of it,” Jacob Jensen says, squinting up.  “Please.  Do me that big favor, would you, Mister Bossman?  Keep it out of the hands of the imams mumbling away around here, who I’m sure would just love to sell it off to the highest bidder.”

“Right, is there any dangerous material on board?  Has it got toxics?  Nuclear materials?  _Will it blow up?”_ Pooch demands, glaring down at him.

“Oh, who the fuck even knows?”

Pooch is gone, diving into the cockpit.

The man rambles on.  “I just walked right into this ship, doped up to the eyeballs, and it started talking to me, you know?  It wouldn’t roll over for anybody else but me, who knows why it started yammering at me.  Well, maybe because I got the hacking code-cracking brain all set up ready to talk to it, and I play nice.  Nobody else even tried sweet-talking it.  The stupid spooks didn’t have a clue, and they sure as hell didn’t want me flying it the way it wanted me to, and you know this scene is gonna get weird the minute they figure out where I went, right?”

Cougar is not sure Jensen has even drawn a breath during his rant.  Some serious lungpower there.  Good to know, after a crash like that.

“Blow that thing right down to Kingdom Come, I’m telling you. You really don’t want guys like Wade owning any of the tech on that craft.  The craft was begging me to kill it, I swear, begged me to kill it dead.  To be precise, it asked me to help it commit _suicide,_ before it got used to destroy cities.  War of the Trifids time, man.  And it followed me around in my head all the time, asking me please, please kill it so Wade’s guys couldn’t play with it.  I was sorry the minute I unlocked it.”

“Wade?” Clay says quietly, hovering close.

“Yeah, you heard of him?  Or his boss, Max?”  The absurdly blue eyes are straining to look up at Clay, blinking wide and then squinting, as if he’s having trouble focusing.

“I have a feeling I will,” Clay says, setting down a gurney improvised out of his pine saplings, cable ties, a wide strip of the craft’s surprisingly tough foil skin, and the blanket from Pooch.

Cougar remembers their CO being cagey about the handler who was supposed to be coordinating this rodeo.  Some Company flunky who reported to a guy higher up, one who meddled all the time directly in the ops.  Just before the op, Clay was busy answering phone calls as if he was getting threats from somebody he couldn’t bitchslap into backing down.  Cougar overheard one of those.

_‘Hi, this is Max again, it’s so boring to have to yank somebody’s leash, but here I am again.’_

Clay had replied, flippantly, “Oh, just own your kink, my man.  Admit you’re a sadist and you just enjoy applying pain.  You’ll feel better about it, and we’ll all get off sooner.”

It hadn’t been what Max wanted to hear, apparently.  No wonder, if studying the saucer was part of Max’s interest.

“You know the skin off that thing could be seriously radioactive.  We don’t have any REM-hazard tags in our gear--” Pooch says on the comm.

“Spin up the helo, Pooch, we’ll get rid of that stuff as soon as we have him on board,” Clay says.  He keeps glancing over at the grass fires.

“You might want to keep it as proof,” Roque says, jumping up in the helo’s door with his gun ready.

“No, I think we’ll really, really want plausible deniability,” Clay says.

“Why?  You _know_ some Company ops asshole named Wade?”

“Later,” Clay says absently, in that voice that usually means, _‘never.’_

Cougar looks up and nods that the man’s injured leg is immobilized.

“We’re good,” Clay says, after a busy minute of silent work with Cougar, strapping the UFO-pilot down on the cabin floor next to the remaining seats, pulling the metal skin out from under him.  As they jolt upward in the air, Clay is tossing the metal sheet out the open door.  It falls among the rest of the wreckage.  Clay slams the cabin door shut.  He says to Jensen, “Wave goodbye.”

Jensen waves at the helo’s overhead.  “Bye-bye, diskie ship, it was great.”  He starts humming a tune about ponies, briefly, and then he looks up at all their scowling faces and grins, and he goes back to singing about werewolves.

By the time Cougar has grabbed the rest of his first aid gear out of his backpack, Clay has pulled out some of their bottled water from the cargo nets at the very back.  An unpleasant vibration is shaking through the frame of the helo as they labor to gain altitude, making it difficult to work on Jensen’s injuries and sew the cut on the man’s ankle.  Jensen is still singing about werewolves in dance clubs with pirates, but he’s not yelling or kicking as Cougar sews him up.

“Must on be some good stuff,” Clay shouts against the cabin noise, holding the man’s leg still above an empty bucket while Cougar uses up valuable water to wash the crusted feet enough to douse them in antiseptic and butter them in antibiotic cream and finally bandage them.  They’ll need more careful cleaning in better circumstances, later, possibly some stitching.

“Nice how he’s not singing on the comm anymore,” Roque shouts.

“Oh, that comm link ran through the li’l diskie ship.  I wanted to talk to friendlies, it found you guys,” Jensen yells.

“Wonderful.  Fucking _alien!”_

“I don’t know why it thought you were friendly, you’re really not, are you?”

“Focus,” Clay shouts, lifting up the man’s ID tags.  “Are these yours?”

“Yes sir, they are.”

“What specialty, Corporal?”

“Communications, sir, emphasis on computers.  I’m a White Hat Hacker, if you want to know, or even if you don’t.”  He doesn’t seem to have any problem projecting his voice loudly enough to be heard from end to end of the helo, which is amazing after a crash like that.  “That’s me, White Hat-Hat-Hat-Hat!”  He laughs.  “Usually they send me out to weasel my way in on the bad guys’ servers, and you’d think that’d be strictly white-collar boring shit, but--”

“Wait a minute here.  What kind of ops?”

“Ops where you trot five miles, shoot people, climb walls, unlock things, and when buildings start going seriously boom, I run like the wind to get my pretty purloined intel out of there without getting my pants shot off--”

“You’re going on field ops out here?”

“Well, I was, until I started nailing down intel on stuff some of our contract security guys were doing on the downlow, you know how they run side shows all the time--getting busy up in them thar hills, mostly in the caves on the Kurdish border, not as much down here, anyway--”

“Focus,” Clay grinds out.

“Anyway, I told my CO.  Yeah, that was probably a bad idea.  Some damned Men in Black kinda Sekrit Agent Men came for me.  Those assholes took me off my CO’s hands, shipped me off to the backside of nowhere, doped to the gills like a soaked little mermaid flapping around.  Oh please, Mister Bad Hat, wuv me and kiss me and feed me, oooh, don’t hurt me, pwease!”  He mades wet sloppy-slappy fish noises.

 “What’s the sitrep where you were held, Corporal?”

“Sitrep?  Once I got down on the ground again, they had me in this underground lair, man, this compound with a buncha other folks doing the mad scientist gig, like they’re drafting these geeks to play the Igor part, only in leg chains, right?  I kept calling those guys Fronk-en-steen, but they didn’t get it.  Deprived childhood, not enough Gene Wilder movies, no sense of humor-- right.  Sitrep.  Okay.  I think it musta been about fifty, sixty clicks north of here.  You guys gonna go liberate them too?  They don’t wanna be there either, you know.”

“Are they all aliens too?” Roque shouts.

“I’m not an alien!”

“Coulda fooled me.”

“Go on, Corporal.  How’d you get on the ship?” Clay says again.

“Oh, these goons of Wade’s started doping me on their crazy mind-fucking junk, made me watch some wierd kinda numbers screens of code, really weird, and put me onto the ship.  Whooo wooo woo--” Swirly eyes, plus noises.

Cougar packs up the first aid gear.  Can’t be called a kit, it’s just a bagged mess in his backpack, crowded amongst his climbing gear.

“Nice _ass_ too,” says Jensen, distracted.

Cougar turns around and gives him a look.

“ _Danger, Will Robinson, danger--”_

“Corporal,” Clay reminds him.

“Right.  Sit-rep, right, sir.  So, they’re tryin’ to get me to make the diskie ship shoot things, make with the raygun-- pew! pew! pew! pew!-- and blow holes in crap.  But I’m not going along with that.  The diskie ship wasn’t having any of that either, no sirree.”

“It has a ray gun?  A laser?”

“Well, not any more.  My nice diskie ship likes-- it _liked_ people, it didn’t like shooting at them.  It ate out the ray gun on my first visit just so I’d believe it.  It could change, grow different things, like the metal skin stuff.  It grew out a chair for me, that’s what kept me from getting crunched flat.  It was kinda organic, like.”

“Oh, well, shit, does setting it on fire even _work--”_ Pooch says.

“That’s what it wants.  What it _wanted,”_ Jensen says.  His eyes fill up.  “It just wanted to fly one last time, and then die.  It could only fly once, just one time, the toxins it picked up from that fucking Russian port, or wherever those assholes held it, that stuff was killing it anyway.  It fucking hurt all the time, and they couldn’t find the chemical filters it had to have, and it knew they’d try to make it kill things, and it just... it just wanted to _die.”_

“You got the flight part done, Corporal,” Clay says.

Jensen blinks up.  Grins.  “Yeah.  _Yeah!  I did it.”_ Then he frowns.  “But it might not be dead, just hurt real bad now, so it can’t even talk to me.  Self-destruct didn’t work, that’s how they got hold of it.  You gotta blow it up, man.  Please.”

“What else did the ship want?”

Jensen laughs.  “World peace, man.  A stable economy, economic parity, green energy, organic architecture designs growing out of tanks, you name it--  Not joking, sir.  Seriously.”  His gaze unfocuses, wanders away.  Jensen starts humming, waving signs with his hands.  The song seems to act like some kind of reset button, a default state for him.  “ _Going to get a big dish of beef chow mein....”_   

Jensen still doesn’t seem to have any problem shouting loud enough to be heard, after talking for so long.  Being stoned out of his punk-ass blonde skull doesn’t slow down the man’s chatter at all.  Blurs the fancier words around the edges, that’s all.  Yeah, the kind of drunk who sounds perfectly fine until he topples over, stiff as a dead tree.

“I got a bad feeling about this,” Pooch says.

“Jensen, look at me.  Jake.  Eyes here, Jensen.  How come you’re talking to us when you don’t even know who we are?”

Jensen waves one hand.  “Oh, sir, come on, you guys couldn’t be more upstanding citizens if you were wearing Captain America underpants.  I mean, I’d give you my Superman pants, but they won’t fit you.  You gotta be at least, what, a Looey or better?  Now, Fast Hand Luke here--man, that is _some ass!_ \-- he has gotta outrank me by a stripe for every foot of hair he’s got waving in the breeze.  And that badass mofo _hat,_ man.  Man, now there’s a hat.  And I’m afraid to ask about Mister Scarface back there, he might make me wet my pants.  Which might be an improvement, honestly, but--”

“Show time,” Pooch says on the comm.

Cougar gives the injured man an opened bottle of water to drink, and stands up, and takes off his hat.  He slides it into a cargo net to save it from the rotor blast.  He’s been crouching there long enough that he needs to stretch before his next task, which is shooting Jensen’s diskie ship until it blows up, or starts a decent fire.  That is, _another_ fire.

Roque has got one of his stolen Russian RPG-7 sticks loaded up by then, and Pooch hovers the helo for them while Cougar slams open the cabin door and fires downward, aiming at the dark hatch of the damaged craft. 

Cracks appear on the outer surface.  He reloads and fires two more grenades into those cracks.  The third is a dud and he has to eject it off the stick in a hurry.  When the dud lands in the rocks below, impact does finally make it blow.  It’s enough to set more trees on fire.

Cougar says, “Turn,” and Pooch swings the helo around.

The oncoming convoy of preacher’s trucks are full of shrink-wrapped pallets, not villagers.

If it’d been villagers, Cougar would have left them alone.  Just dump the final armed bomb on the diskie ship, hand the stick off to Roque, conserve the rest of their RPG-7s for later.  As it is, no.  Cougar tilts his head slightly, which is all Clay needs to understand his question.

“Take them out, Cougar,” Clay says on the comm.

Cougar lays down four more RPG-7s into the convoy, leaving the front end crumpled together blocking the narrow track, and the back end lit up in fireworks.  All that opiate resin burns even better than pine trees.

“God _damn,”_ Jensen says, when he can’t even see it, he can only _hear_ some of it past the helo’s prop wash.

Roque grunts, satisfied.  “Fucking smugglers.”

“Smugglers?”  Clay snorts.  “You’re looking at a really major export of the state of Afghanistan, guys, and not a small operation here.  Somebody’s gonna be hosed over losing this batch.  Gotta be a year’s crop for a couple three valleys lost right there, at least.”

 _“Fuckers,”_ Roque growls, like he’d come back just to do this part again.

“I see why you like him,” Jensen yells.

Clay leans over close enough for Jensen to hear him.  “Yeah, having a Captain into demolitions means never having to say you’re sorry you only nailed half of that darn convoy.”

Below them, two empty trucks are peeling away, swinging wildly around the mess at the only place there’s any room beside the narrow track, and they speed back toward the village.  A third one belatedly follows, full of movement and gunnery stuff happening in the open truckbed.  Cougar watches a moment.  Then Cougar hands back the empty RPG-7 stick, points at the bigger gun.  Clay jams the mag back in the M82 he used earlier, and hands it to Cougar.

Cougar draws down on the third truck, taking his time, allowing for the erratic vibrations of the helo jolting under him and the truck bucketing along the road.  He shoots the engine block twice, in the most difficult technical shots of the whole assignment so far. 

The third truck plunges off the road, down a twenty-foot slope, crashes into a bunch of boulders, and catches fire.

He knows it’s a twenty-foot slope.  He looked at the topo maps earlier, studying possible approaches to reach several spots to establish his blind above the village.

The two trucks in front can’t go any faster.  Cougar grunts.

Clay smiles.  “You big softy.”

Cougar yanks out the mag, hands off the heavy M82 to him.  Two trucks ought to be enough cargo space to get the villagers out of range of these damned fires, if they don’t try to haul away too much of their daily living crap with them.  Or all their goats and chickens.  This is good.  The fires will force them to head away from the diskie ship wreck.

“Our UFO is now officially on fire,” Pooch says on the comm.

There’s a muffled crumping noise, a series of crackling _booms_ inside the thing below, and then Pooch is zooming the helo upward hard enough to make Cougar drop to his knees, hard.  Clay hangs onto Cougar while together they slam shut the cabin door. 

Clay takes the RPG-7 stick from the seat next him, hands it across to Roque to stow, and puts the mag out of Cougar’s M82 into Cougar’s open backpack.  Then he pushes the gun more safely under the seats on the cabin floor, so it won’t slide against Jensen.  Clay drops into his own seat, wiping his face, picks up the smaller Stoner rifle, unracks  the camera-scope from it, hands it off to Cougar.

Roque ties himself upright at the back with a spare cargo net.  He hates sitting down in those damned toy-sized seats anyway, claims it makes him twitchy.

Cougar slides into the seat next to Jensen’s shoulder, careful of his own bruised knees, aims the camera-scope hastily out the window, and finally buckles in.  When he looks down at the man on the helo's floor, he pauses in disbelief.

“You’re fuckin’ _beautiful,”_ Jensen says, gazing up at him with wide blue eyes.

Cougar hoists a skeptical eyebrow.  He thinks, _Just because we rescued you._

Jacob Jensen can read eyebrow too.  “Oh no, I’m hard to impress, but hey, that’s some pretty shooting.  I bet you got all those fancy presidential tabs on your dress shirt, don’t you?”

Cougar scowls, retrieves his hat from the net by his seat, jams it on.

Jensen keeps talking.  This explains why he was in that ship in the first place:  Jensen has a bad habit of pushing his luck _way_ too far.  “I bet you’re really secretly a sniper’s sniper, aren’t you?”

 _“Oh shut uuuup,”_ Roque shouts over the noise.

“Really nice work, best thing anybody’s ever done for me, that first shot hitting the diskie ship for me...”

“Clay, I’m gonna vomit, they’re making me _sick,”_ Roque shouts.

“Then don’t look,” Clay advises him.  “HQ officer training, man, learning to go, ‘Lalala la la la LA LA LA,’ really loud.  You’ll thank me later.”

Jensen rambles on.  “I thought I was a goner, looking at that ridge coming at me, we’re talking wet-your-pants suspense here--”

“Drink,” Cougar says repressively, handing over another opened bottle.

Jensen keeps talking, sipping between words, waving the bottle around in a rather drunken manner.  “--but that shot of yours did something weird to the balance in the diskie, and off she went, voooma _vooma_ vooma gaaak gaaak, making these shit scary noises, down the valley instead of smacking into the deathwall of doom back there.  I mean, that’s just _crazy_ luck-- buddy, you saved my _life--”_

“Rest,” Cougar says, gripping Jensen’s wrist and taking the empty bottle from him, and putting his wrist down on his chest with an extra little push:  _Stay._

“You may be beautiful, but you’re fucking _bossy,”_ Jensen says.

“Most beautiful things are,” Clay says lazily, and chuckles at the outraged looks he gets.

Roque yells, “Well, you’d know that better ‘n most, huh, Clay?”

Clay just smiles, leans in closer, yells at Jensen.  “Tell me, Corporal, where did that craft come from?”

“Well, that’s just it, nobody knew.  I don’t think any of Wade’s boss guys knew.  The tech heads would argue about the propulsion systems, down there in our cozy little black ops Igor dungeon in our janky li’l leg irons, but none of them knew any better than me.”

The comm crackles, and Pooch says, “So the prisoners got to hang out together and talk about it, back where the ship was kept?”

Clay relays this question to Jensen.

“Oh yeah, they ran that place like a prison block, four to a cell.  Scratch out physics on the walls, man.  The tech-heads argued all the time.  Some of them said they bet the Russians found it melting out of an iceberg in the Arctic or shit, and Wade stole it from our own guys on the downlow, because our subs stole it from the Russian submarine pen at whats-her-blue-tits-frigid-place up there that needs more vowels, I can’t say it when I’m sober either.”

“Severomorsk, or Vostochny Port?” Clay says the Russian names correctly.  He ought to, as much Russian as he claims to speak.  His Russian girlfriends have been more insane than the rest, possibly because they had about ten liters more vodka on board.  Besides setting things alight with the alcohol on their breath, those gals can fucking _drink._

“Yeah, Vostock whatever, that’s it.  What’s it mean, ‘big hole in the ice’?”

“East Port.  Big place, at the end of the Trans-Siberian Railroad.”

“Anyway, let’s just say none of Wade’s scary guys were explaining diskie ship’s chain of custody.  Nope, even though it might have helped _me_ figure out what the hell was up with the ship’s systems.  Yeah, they really were doing that damn X-Files thing, trying to reverse engineer what they found on it.”  He sings the theme song of the tv series.  He even manages the discordant chord change.  “That series had Scully, wow, you know I had a crush on her like forever.  Brains _and_ red hair, that woman was the hottest thing since--”

Clay nods silently.  A strange moment of nostalgia hangs among them.  Posters of Gillian Anderson graced the school lockers of all of Cougar’s geeky friends.  Her X-Files character actually wasn’t crazy enough to appeal to Clay’s usual tastes in dramatic women, yet the actress’s screensaver is still there on Clay’s office computer.  Well, she _was_ shown as a competent shot with a service pistol.  That ups the ante considerably whenever Clay gets infatuated.

“Fucking _alien,”_ Roque growls.

“So what did Wade’s people want you to do with the craft?” Clay asks.  He’s getting that iron note in his voice that means he’s grinding his molars too much.  Probably he wants a cigarette or a drink or he just wants to _kill_ somebody.  At a guess, it’s got more to do with Wade, or with Max, than with Jensen’s maddening perambulations around the facts.

Cougar tips his hat warningly at Jensen.  _Get on with it._

“Umm, I guessed from all the prehistoric grunting, they wanted me to hack open the ship’s intel like it was some smack-selling kid’s gaming system on cable back in Bagram.  And they’d try things offtime, too, messing things around when I was down for the count.  Just pissing off the ship’s security protocols, too.  No hope.  Like asking a dog to sing opera, you know?”

“No, I can’t say I’ve ever tried.  The horns and the helmets kinda creep me out.”

“Sad.  And the yodeling, man.” Jensen manages a few bars of the Ride of the Valkyries.

“Wagner,” Clay says, as if he knows his altos from his sopranos.  He probably dated some, before they tried to nail him with a backstage sandbag or something.  “Pagliacci.”

“Shut uuup, now you’re creeping _me_ out!” Pooch says on the comm.

 _“Clowns,”_ Cougar says, his face totally straight.  Poker-straight, even.  Some imp of the perverse.  He can never resist that kind of temptation either.

“Shut _uuuuup!”_ Pooch yells that he’s never getting that smashed with Cougar again.  Ever.

Clay rolls his eyes.  “Promises, promises.”

Jensen blinks up slowly at Clay.  “You know your sniper guy is like seriously beautiful, right?  And you’re like, so butch and senior and reassuring and like you just _own_ the manbeard from hell.  It almost hurts to look at you.  You’re so awesome, I want to be one of your unit and crawl in somewhere nice and safe with you guys and just sleep for _days.”_

“And you’re _tripping balls,”_ Roque snarls.

“Yeah, which is why I’m _afraid_ to look at you, Mister Scar-- Mister Big,” Jensen says.

“You might start crying in fear?” 

“Totally whimpering like a baby, really.  No filters, man, I’m gone.”

Cougar frowns down at Jensen.  This is very strange, coming from the man who didn’t even flinch when Cougar was sewing up that cut on his leg, and washing crud out of the scrapes and crisscross rock cut mess on his feet.

Oh, Roque _loves_ getting appeased.  Ten seconds flat and Jensen knows it, too.  It’s possible that Jensen has Lieutenant William Roque diagrammed just like mapping out hidden files on one of his target computers.

“What?  Why are you giving me the eyebrow again?  You totally are.”

 _“Rest,”_ Cougar says again.

“Mister Bossman, he’s giving me the meanie eyebrow.  I thought I wasn’t supposed to sleep with the concussion thingie, and now he doesn’t want me to talk to stay awake--”

“That’s old first aid information.  In sections, yeah, you can sleep.  We’ll wake you up every four hours,” Clay says.

“You’re the best.  Meanie eyebrow, I’m closing my eyes and not looking at your beautiful face, so you can just go off and be mean at somebody else.”

“He probably will, for _your_ benefit, Jensen, when we get down again.  So behave yourself,” Clay says.

“Really?  He will?”

 _“Yes,”_ Cougar says, annoyed at this game.  He knows who gets to set the alarm to go off every four hours. 

“Oh goodie, meanie eyebrow is going to give it to them, whoever it is who needs a really good meanie look at them, yes indeed,” and he starts humming that damn song again.  Starts articulating the words over the hum. 

_“...I saw a werewolf drinking a pina colada at Trader Vic's,_

_And his hair was perfect._

_Ahhwooooo... Werewolves of London, Huh! Draw blood!_

_Ahhwooooo... Werewolves of London...”_  

“Shut uuuup,” Roque says. 

_“...You hear him howling around your kitchen door,_

_You better not let him in...”_  

Cougar leans over and gives Jensen a stern look.  Jensen cracks open one eye, looking up at him, just checking to see what he’s doing.  Caught at it, Jensen sticks out his lower lip, making a face at Cougar. 

Cougar lowers both brows at him. 

“Fine, fine,” Jensen mutters, shutting his eyes, and giving a hmphing noise.   Then he’s singing again.  “ _Ahhwooooo... Werewolves of London, Huh! Draw blood!_

 _Ahhwooooo... Werewolves of London..._ What, don’t you sing yourself to sleep when you’re feeling all little-bitty and scared and it’s so fucking dark at night?  It’s fucking _dark_ out here!” 

Cougar looks around at Clay, who gives a defeated little shrug.  Clay says, “We have seriously _got_ to give this man a new song to work on.” 

The helo’s sound system crackles noisily and produces two static-crippled verses of  the Journey song _Don’t Stop Believing_ , and finally scribbles itself into silence.  By then, Jensen is already singing along, and he keeps going on his own.  He knows all the words.  Of course he does. 

“Thank you for the kind thought,” Clay drawls, glaring daggers at their pilot, who doesn’t look back.  He’s busy.  Very, very busy. 

“Still haven’t proved to _me_ that _this_ is a respectable member of the US Army and not a _fucking alien,”_ Roque rumbles. 

“Roque, I don’t think he will ever be able to satisfy you about that.”  Clay shakes his head sadly, as if he has some idea what they’re in for.  “Superman boxers, man.” 

Jensen starts singing one of the Superman movie theme songs instead, causing Roque to make death-threats.  Jensen only finds this amusing.  He creates new silly verses. 

Jensen finally breaks off to ask more questions.  “Sir, hey, Mister Bossman, are you guys gonna go in and be your badass selves and liberate those eggheads being held against their geeky wills?  It’s a prison, it’s fucking Azkaban and it’s inhumane and unAmerican and besides, I know where it is.  I could show you, sir, if you’ve got some decent maps--” 

“There _are_ no decent maps of this UpFuckistan country,” Pooch growls on the comm. 

Since Jensen doesn’t have a comm now, he can’t hear that.  He just keeps talking.  “If you’ve got a laptop, once we’re down, I could hook up to a sat feed and find you stats on who these folks are and why we oughta rescue them and send ‘em back--they’re all former USSR scientists who got kidnapped and nobody could find ‘em--” 

Clay sighs.  “Of course they are.” 

“How long has it been since you pissed off Command enough to send you out here?” Pooch says.  “Oh wait, to send _all_ of us out here?” 

Clay flaps one hand, waving it off.  “That was six months ago.” 

“Like they’re gonna _forget,”_ Roque growls. 

“You’d be surprised,” Clay says dryly, slouching back in his chair. 

“So picking up a guy who _stole somebody’s hotsy totsy new ride_ is not gonna give anybody ideas about what Icefuckistan country really needs you next?--excuse me, _all of us_?” 

“What ship?  We saw him wandering around lost and injured, with a concussion, in the line of fire, plus actual forest fire, so naturally we picked him up,” Clay says, not even blinking.  It’s breathtaking, sometimes.  “Right, Corporal Jensen?” 

“What you said, sir."

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Among the smaller random shoutouts is a reference to the actress Gillian Anderson in the TV series and movie X-Files, where she plays the character of FBI Agent and forensic pathologist Dana Scully.  
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-Files  
> She’s one of the first models for hot women in forensic science, especially those holding guns. She brought up echoes of earlier models yet like Diana Rigg in the 60’s, playing Emma Peel of The Avengers, British version.  
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Avengers_(TV_series)


	5. Volunteers

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Cougar knows better. They all do. Jensen, the alien, talks them into it anyway. Cougar's still trying to figure out how he managed that.

The helo is making some unpleasant noises.  Pooch mutters under his breath and thumps a few things, and the noises stop.  "Yeah, fucker, think you're gonna play that game with me--we are not having with that, got it?"

"I didn't know you could do that to a helo," Jake says.

"It's his superpower," Clay says solemnly.

"Oh, got it." Then Jake keeps going, pointing at the map. "So their facility on the surface looks like every other mudheap along here, but they’ve got caves under it, it’s buried in this rock massif like that ridge where you guys found me, in this itty bitty teeny weeny narrow valley--” 

“Of course it is,” Pooch growls. 

“--maybe fifty klicks up northeast from the big Y in the canyons, where the other arm goes to Chora--” 

“Do they have other saucers they’re working on too?” Clay asks. 

“No.  Just parts, things they copied, not a whole one like that.  They’re gonna be so  _pissed,_  you won’t believe.”  Jensen is smiling at nothing, hugging himself, like this whole disaster is the most fun he’s had in  _years._  

“Great, just great,” Pooch says on the comm.  “Sure thing.  Embassy guards in Ulan Bator,  _if we’re lucky._  Convoy on yaks and drink mare’s milk, have you  _heard_  the stories?” 

“Fermented,” Cougar says. 

“What, you’ve  _been_  there?” Pooch yelps. 

Cougar shrugs.  “Utaanbaatar, Smog Hero.  Air gets bad in the winter.” 

Pooch gives a strangled groan. 

 _“Really?”_  Jensen says.  “They had election riots back in 2008--is that why you--?” 

“Cowboys.  Learn polo with a pig’s head.” 

“Oh, you’d pass for a Mongol, _easy,”_  Jensen says. 

Cougar shakes his head.  Not the way  _they_  ride. 

“What, no way?  Huh, cuz of the way they all smoke like chimneys?  Those stinking Chinese ciggies are really  _rank.”_ Jensen makes a face. 

Yeah, that’s what the guy does with  _no help_  from Pooch’s hints on the comm.  Clay really has no clue how dangerous this trivia-brained guy is.  No fucking clue. 

Roque growls, “Don’t wet your thong, we’re not going haring off on some stupid rescue op on the word of some fucking _alien_.” 

“I thought we established that I’m not an alien, sir, I mean all of those sirs present whose names, ranks and social security numbers I am unsure of, with all due respect, sirs, but actually I’m a bonafide American citizen and a member of the US Army, social number--” 

 _“Fucking alien,”_  Roque growls. 

Pooch says, on the comm, because he’s sneaky like that, “Or maybe he’s singing that damn song because it’s a  _hint._   Maybe he’s a fucking werewolf who’s gonna change at the full moon and rip all our throats out, huh, Roque?  You think it’s a secret message so he’ll only save Cougar--cause he _likes_  Cougar, K-I-S-S-I-N-G, go see Cougar and Jensen swinging in a tree--so hey, he bites Cougar on that damn bony ass of his and turns Cougar into a monster too--” 

“Pooch the romantic,” Cougar says, straight-faced, and watches the smile curl up on Clay’s face.  Clay’s fighting it hard, but the smirk was there. 

Pooch keeps going.  “--and then whadaaya think, could they chomp your really long knife right in half?” 

“Oh  _shut uuup,”_  Roque says, disgusted. 

“You only say that out of lurve,” Jensen says, which earns a blood-curdling cry of disgust. 

“Too many horror movies, guys.  And too much chatter,” Clay says, earning silence.  Briefly. 

“If I can get a laptop, I can find you some maps, even,” Jensen wheedles, ignorant of the byplay on the comm. 

“Cougar, get him to  _shut up,_  if you ever want any more chocolate,  _for the rest of your life--”_ Roque starts. 

Which is infuriating, giving away anybody’s name like that.  Even a nickname. 

Cougar glares back at the SIC.  It’s worrying, too.  Roque has been ill for a least a week, some kind of stomach bug that’s increased the unit’s latrine stops.  It hasn’t improved his sweet nature a bit.  But Roque hasn’t got up and  _hurt_  anybody yet, and normally his patience only goes to the third time telling somebody to shut their fucking cakehole.  It’s bad enough to make Cougar wonder if there’s an appendectomy in Roque’s future.  Or vermifuges. 

Clay adds smoothly, “--then you’ll figure out how to encourage our injured colleague there to  _rest while he can,_  as it’s likely to be a very long and bumpy trip.” 

“What?  You like chocolate?  Hey, so do I.   _Cougar,_  right?  That’s really your name?  Cougar, what kind of chocolate do you--” Jensen squints up at him. 

Cougar just points one finger, close up in Jensen’s face where he can’t avoid seeing it, warningly. 

“Not  _fair,”_  Jensen mutters.  “Six weeks of living on oatmeal and rice and mutton yuck, and here I am with my new friends flying away into sweet, sweet freedom, and there isn’t a single Twizzler on this aircraft, not one.  Or M&Ms. Or Snickers.  Or Red Vines.  Or Mars Bars.  Or Sweet Tarts, or--” 

 _“What?”_  Clay says. 

“How the fuck would you know?” Roque growls. 

“I can smell it.  There is no candy anywhere on this bird.  None.  MRE candy does not count.” 

 _“Fucking alien,”_ Roque repeats. 

“Well, I can smell all your skanky selves too, but there isn’t a single item of decent sugary tooth-rotting goodness left on this bird, is there?” 

 _“No,”_ Cougar growls. 

“Because  _you_  ate it all up, Cougar?” Jensen says. 

“Two weeks ago,” Clay says tiredly. 

Cougar glares at his commanding officer.  Jensen’s right.  Little brown-colored rations of waxy sugar doled out in their MREs don’t fucking  _count._  

“I know, I know, it’s terrible when you run out, it’s so sad.”  Jensen pats his hand on Cougar’s shin--a hand so big it feels like getting bumped by a baseball mitt. 

Cougar puts a boot down with careful precision on Jensen’s bicep, pressing the meat down into the helo’s deck. 

If this was hostile, if he’d been doing this to any of the other guys as a hostile agent, he’d have been messed up badly.  Roque would’ve grabbed the gun out of Cougar’s boot by now.  Clay would have flipped him right out of his seat with a jui-jitsu grip on his knee, and Pooch would have hoisted up Cougar’s boot in the air, twisted it at the knee, and put it right out of joint.  

Jensen just lets go, opens those big hands wide.  “Okay, okay, no touchy hippydippy bonding shit, okay, no grubby fingerprints on the Cougster’s person.  Okay, okay, I get it, no hugging, man, let up, Cougs, I’ll be good.  I’ll ask first.  Really I will.” 

Cougar huffs out a skeptical breath, lifting his toe away. 

Clay grunts too, shakes his head. 

 _“Cougster?”_  Pooch repeats.   _“Cougs?_  Oh, man, I got a bad feeling about this.  Where’s my goddamn navigator?  You asleep back there?” 

Roque growls, “You wish.  When we get to the river fork, it’s time to make off southwest down the canyon back to Chora, or head up-canyon northeast, into the wild blue after this alleged facility that allegedly--” 

Jensen chuckles.  “Oh, it’s just up inside Daykundi province.  They’ve got pretty good security compared to the south, I guess that’s why Wade’s bunch settled in there instead of hassling with real insurgents.  They grow lots of almonds, you know.  Not just poppies.” 

 “--haring off after our guest alien’s dungeon allegedly fulla Russian geeks--” Roque yells. 

“Mmm, really, not so much with the Russian, no.  Big language barrier for Wade’s ex-KGB heavies.  I mean, they got mathematicians and chemists and shit, they dragged ‘em in from all over the place.  They had some Czechs, some Ukrainians, coupla Tajiks, umm, there was somebody who spoke Yakut, a Litvak, and a Chuvash guy, and a Tartar,  they were all arguing in some kinda mangled Turkish... physicists, man, it’s like the UN in there but no translators to help out.  The rest, umm... so, how’s your Lithuanian, maybe?”

“Passable,” Clay says. 

Roque makes a rude snorting noise.  “Like hell.  And your Turkish is for shit.” 

“Everybody’s Turkish is shit.  Half the Turks I meet can’t even write their own--” 

“That’s because you hang with such classy people.  You hang with Americans who can’t fucking write their own  _names,”_ Roque says. 

Clay snorts.  “But they can sure blow shit up.” 

“No, that’s just your  _girlfriends,”_  Roque says. 

“I’m just not feeling the love,” Clay says. 

“Ask Pooch,” Cougar says, which makes Roque bark out a laugh. 

“Your Pashto’s worse,” says Pooch on the comm. 

“Neener neener,” Jensen says, undeterred by hearing only half of the conversation.  “But the chess games were  _awesome.”_  

“Little problem there, guys,” Pooch says.  “Maybe  _our_  eggheads would kinda like to ask  _their_  eggheads about that aircraft.  You know how CENTCOM will get cranky if we leave them out.” 

“What aircraft?” Clay says. 

“Shit,” Roque says. 

“We just backtrack his path on Corporal Jensen’s memory, which is clearly limited by the drugs he was given.  We find out where the other prisoners are being held, and hand them over down south at Kandahar for debriefing and possible repatriation.  Or maybe up north at Bagram, even.  If some of those engineers or scientists happen to bring up their highly classified work on some kinda nutty unidentified aircraft, it’s really not our problem.” 

This superb capacity to edit the facts may be key to understanding Clay’s screwups with women.  Cougar tilts his hatbrim in tribute to the master. 

 _“Wow,”_  Jensen says, looking up, and he starts to laugh softly.  “Just...  _wow,_  man.  But will they buy it?”

 “It’s a gift,” Clay says modestly. 

Cougar grimaces, which makes Jensen laugh some more. 

Pooch has never bought into it, not even once.  “Still got a little problem, sir.  You wanna ask Corporal Jensen how many guys he counted for Mister Wade’s side?  Plus, if we go liberating the brain trust, we’ll need transport to get ‘em away from there.  Even if you’d rather massacre a buncha ex-KGB guys--and good luck with that--then you still gotta shift all the civilians.”  Pooch is their transport expert for good reasons. 

“How did Wade’s bunch bring in the civilians in the first place?” Clay asks. 

“By covered trucks, chains on benches in the back, lotsa times.  Coupla new truckloads of stuff and a few new prisoners every week or so, from what I saw,” Jensen says.

“Easier to drive than aircraft, at least, if we take ‘em out the same way.  How many civilians?” 

Jensen grins.  It’s a helluva grin.  But it’s still not an answer.   _“Awesome!”_  

Yeah, there it is, that sinking feeling.  Familiar.  Goes with watching disaster in motion, with watching Clay make crazy decisions. The one where your head is saying,  _‘Oh hell no,’_  while your mouth is somehow, inexplicably, saying,  _“I’d be delighted to.”_  

 _Aaaaarghh._  

“Jensen,” Clay says in his gravelly voice. 

“They had nineteen geeks and techs and stuff in the main cells, maybe another three, four specialists kept off by themselves, physics guys not allowed to talk to each other or us.” 

“We’re gonna need layouts.  Diagrams.” 

“I can do that, yes sir, I certainly can,” Jensen says. 

“How many guards did Wade have?” 

“Umm, lemme count up,” Jensen says, and starts humming, waving his hands distractedly in time. 

“How  _many?”_  Roque yells. 

“Four round-the-clock shifts down in the labs and cells, eight on daylight, nine on night shift, two supervisors, umm, Wade had a coupla personal heavies, and visiting brass dragged along a 12-squad or two of their own, and there was always somebody visiting--” 

“Fifty to sixty-two troops,” Cougar says.  It’s quite automatic. 

“Counting Wade himself, and one more for the brass,” Clay agrees. 

“Oh, you’re  _good,”_ Jensen confirms, grinning up at them. 

“Topside?” Cougar asks. 

“Umm.  You mean, around the trucks?” 

 _“Shit,”_  Roque says, rattling the hardware on the cargo net strapping him to the back wall.   _“Fucking_  alien.  Fucking  _queer_ alien.  Goddamn fricken alien--” 

“How many troops?”Clay demands. 

Jensen starts singing, as if he’s wandering.  As if he doesn’t quite remember how many. 

Bullshit. 

“ _I_ will make you wet your pants,” Cougar says. 

“Briefly,” Clay adds, amused. 

“You know, Cougs, I think you’re scarier than--” 

 _“How many?”_ Cougar growls. 

“Umm.  When they brought me in, they had a day squad upstairs, five guys.  Ugly mofos, like, these grumpy Armenian gangster types.  Not as sharp as the ex-KGB guys inside.  When I flew off, about 4 am, I saw muzzle flashes from, oh, six guys.” 

Their CO rubs his face, hard.  “How many different watches up top?” 

“I don’t know, sir,” Jensen admits. 

Cougar sits back, props one boot across the other knee, bracing himself against the unnerving rattle of the helo, and stares straight ahead.  His view of the cockpit shows Pooch fighting with the helo’s cyclic control.  Wonderful. 

“Ahh, c’mon, you guys are badass, I know you can do this.  I know it.  When I was hacking one of their servers, I found out where there’s an ammo dump they use, we could pick up all the kinda shit the insurgents use for IEDs--  they had some decent birds parked there too--” 

“Oh, so  _now_  we’re starting a ground war  _before_  we tackle a KGB black ops project,” Roque yells. 

“No, look, that’s just to distract the guys topside, right?  If I can get onto a laptop, I can hack into their servers at the project, misdirect lots of their guards into getting out of our way--” 

Everybody looks down at Jensen.

“It’s what I did to fly out.  It’s only been a coupla hours?” 

Cougar twists his wrist, presenting the watch face to Jensen’s view. 

“So, um, what, four, five hours?  They’re still blind.  They won’t have figured out how to stop the temporary ghosts I put on their security cameras,” Jensen says. 

“Oh,  _security cameras too,”_  Roque says. 

“I’m beginning to see how you managed to steal their UFO,” Clay says. 

Cougar lets out a long, slow breath.  Yes sir, here’s the Losers.  Just show them a plan with explosives and they’re lapping it up like dogs on disgusting smelly dead stuff, oooh yummy.  Probably explains how the General always manages to get Clay to buy in on such absolutely  _damn fool_ missions.  Blowing shit up?  We’re  _on_  it,  _woof woof woof._  

It’s  _not_  just a serious group-need to keep Roque busy and happy over his detonators, either--although that fault has got some truly crappy experiences to answer for. 

The helo lurches. 

 _Oh fucking Fuckupistan, here we go._   

Pooch is just as guilty of absolutely hairyass mindfuckery.  Great example:  Their current view of heavily-folded sedimentary formations playing closeup in the helo’s windows. 

Maybe some  _coal seams_  right there, dark lines probably about eight inches thick.  Cougar’s pretty sure nobody else has  _ever_  looked at this stuff from the air.  Probably nobody else will ever manage to try.  Pooch would snarl at him that he should just fucking  _appreciate_ such a unique experience. 

Cougar knows who  _would_ appreciate eight-inch coal seams. 

Briefings have emphasized the lithium prospects that some big companies would like to exploit, if anybody can ever drive off, or more likely pay off, the insurgents.  And there’s plenty of other things, too.  Afghanistan, Future Corporate Source of Major Rare Earth Elements to Run All Your Electronics.  Plus, coal.   

He’s been on some ops where the real objective was to get pictures of coal seams.  That’s why Cougar knows a surprising amount about mining concerns.  And oil concerns.  Usually such seams are just little skinny things, more like two-three inches thick.  Slavering is  _such_  an ugly look.  Even on corporate mining guys in tasteless suits. 

His pictures later got used to justify some other sniper taking out tribal chieftains who were  too likely to object when the mining companies made silly offers.  Decent leaders, guys who’ve never done anything more militant than trying to get their people some goddamn help with basic services from the central government.  Cougar has to do  _that_ much homework to do a decent job on the op.  He is not fond of orders that remind him that he’s the little fingertip of all those multinationals with Congressmen on tap and the ear of the President. 

But he hasn’t been asked to do those ops lately, not since he joined Clay’s team, because Clay won’t loan him out again for _that_  kind of shit.  Clay’s deskful, all those stacks of neglected paperwork sliding onto the floor, are merely camo.  Clay’s damn good at what he does. 

The helo yaws, hiccups.  Cougar would rather not explore the country’s geology face-first, either, thanks.  Crawling over it by the inch, silently, is plenty for him. 

Pooch isn’t cursing yet, it must not be as bad as it looks. 

You’d  _never_  know Pooch earned his proper berth as a Loser if you just saw that innocent baby face of his, mooning away over his pictures of Jolene like he’s just another sentimental GI Joe with a constant hard-on.  Cougar has to avoid noticing  _that,_  every morning.  Don’t ask, and don’t by fucking God  _look._ Jolene clearly has a taste for serious banana splits. 

Cougar looks down at their guest.  There’s the first challenge he’s seen in a long time for that title, and yes, it looks like their guest will be competing in several  _other_ categories besides the usual insanity defense.  Just take in the that beautifully wide-open corn-fed face, those big shocking blue eyes, which are always a warning of  _biggest fucking liar on earth,_  in Cougar’s considerable experience at knocking sense into people.  Often just after he’s been knocking boots with them.  All too often, when Cougar is trying to do them a favor, giving advice that’s doomed to be ignored. 

Liars.  Not always, but near enough, it’s been.  Huge wide eyes just dripping with innocence, clear as a midsummer sky, and he falls for it every time.   _He_  does.  Forget Clay and his sappy sentimentality.  This is  _Cougar_  buying it, chomping onto it and gulping it down like a stupid catfish.  Just swallowing it all whole in one bite, hook, line, and sinker.  

Blue eyes, man.   He’s always totally _loved_  staring into that weird recessive color where you can see every last fiber of their iris twitching, you can read every last flicker of expression in the pond, it’s all beautifully visible, every last thing they’re thinking.  The translucent skin, where you can see every last heartbeat pulsing like it’s china.  You think you’re seeing all of it.  You’re  _certain_  of it.  

Then, come to find out, those blue eyes can still fucking _lie like a fucking rug._  

He’s taken years to figure out these damned lying blue-eyed liars do all their crazy adjustments to the truth somewhere in the back of their brains.  The back end that’s actually running the whole show will get squirrelly.  Then it hides things from the forward bits--the bits that show. Selective cabinets, opening and closing all the respectable boxes, never letting the secrets out front.  This can be useful in a spy, a forward operative, a recon soldier who’s got caught.  Not so useful in somebody who’s supposed to be on his own team. 

He learned that from observing Clay’s women.  Clay likes redheads, as well as highly-trained homicidal Russian brunettes with legs like track stars, ever since some gal in grade school cared enough to use a classy monogrammed lighter to fire up his sorry ass. She was trying, like all the rest, to impress on him that his behavior really ought to get modified.  It never did, of course.  It just made Franklin Clay really strange about his choice in dates.  That’s the kind of thing you learn when your CO gets blitzed out of his mind--so long as you’re getting shit-faced too.  You aren’t allowed to ask about points of historical interest when you’re the only designated driver in miles. 

It’s just possible all the Losers drink too much. 

Clay’s green-eyed Irish spitfires aren’t quite as good as this boy at it.  Or the Russian gals.  Just look at that All-American, totally credible, smiling farmboy Clark Kent face.   _Shit._  

Fucking  _hell,_  Jensen is winking at Cougar.  Puckering up in a little  _kissy_ gesture, with those “oh God yes sir, please sir, I-really-do-suck-cock-like-a-champ-for-hours,” plushy pink lips. 

 _Fuck._  

Or maybe, not.  Probably much better  _not._   It’s going to be damned hard to ignore, in several senses of the word.  Especially when you cap it with Cougar’s gnarly sekrit lil kink about strength and competence in the field, yeah.  Talk about stamina.  Even on the good drugs, other guys do not just sit there singing stupid songs, cracking jokes while Cougar sews them up. 

 _Stop thinking about--_ Cougar looks straight ahead at the canyon walls beyond Pooch’s head.  It’s like that saying about seasickness:  One minute you’re afraid you’re going to die, and the next minute you’re afraid you’re not,  _which_  could possibly be worse? 

He knows that Clay’s already plotted out the entire admin route to talk the General into letting him have this guy on the team.  He wants to adopt this one.  This guy is a fucking Loser, born and bred.  Cougar knows  _that_  look too. 

Fuckupistan fucking hellascrewedupistani godfreydaniel idiota-- it’s way beyond a law.  If you like dick, do not screw where you eat.  Sergeant Carlos “Cougar” Alvarez knows a few odd expletives himself, especially after observing Lt. Roque’s little displays of invective during CAPE while running trials on candidates for the team.  Their SlC gets pretty foul while discovering members of that man’s Army are totally failing his old-fashioned standards. 

What Cougar knows, and Jacob Jensen does not, is that the Corporal has already passed most of those tests and was not even aware of it.  It’s going to be fun watching Roque run Jensen through the remainder of the trials he puts all their FNGs through.

 Cougar folds his hands together and exercises his memory of Roque’s expression and the location and circumstances every time that officer delivered himself of a startling new curse.  He doesn’t restrict himself to English.  It takes awhile.  Sniper memory is supposed to be precise.  Kim’s Game has no mercy.   _Amazing_  how much this precision is not appreciated, especially when it conflicts with the more convenient recall of other people. 

The Losers know better than to argue with Cougar.  In return, he doesn’t talk much.  It helps, or he’d be constantly reminding everybody they’ve got it wrong.  Because they get it wrong  _all the time._ He’s not expecting Jensen to do any better.  Risky, basing their calculations on Jensen’s memory while he was a drugged prisoner, doing crazy things to escape. 

“What kind of birds were at the ammo depot, and how do you know that?” Clay says. 

Cougar twists around, gives him a sharp look. 

Clay just grins back at him.  That’s a bad, bad grin.  Cougar’s only seen that grin a couple of times.  Last time, it involved a train car of industrial lubricant spilled across a highway in a major urban center in South Africa.  Cougar has never liked the inside of African jails.  Any of them, as much as they may vary in construction of Cougar-resistant features. 

Jensen sounds insulted.  “I checked it out when I flew past.  Had to see what I might be up against.  I never expected  _you guys!”_  

 _“Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition,”_  Cougar says.  Hell, might as well.  The End of Days may be near, quite personally.  Walls of rock are looming ahead of the cockpit.  Again. 

 “Oh fucking icebergs in hell, Cougar’s talking.”  Pooch does something and the helo yaws like a flounder on a line, leaving their stomachs behind for a few unpleasant minutes. 

There’s such a thing as flying below the radar, which is different from turning into a  _Himalayan sandwich_  complete with gooey mush and a lack of enough climbing rope and carabiners to get out again, should you survive it. 

Jensen bursts into laughter.  He’s yelling something about lumberjacks, and then werewolves, and pirates, and Pokémon, all scrambled together in a slur of rapid pop references that Cougar can’t follow.  His hands wave around like he’s on a roller coaster, and he’s having a fun ride. 

 _“What?”_ Rogue roars out. 

“This is fucking nuts, you know that,” Pooch says on the comm, pulling the bird out as if he hasn’t just made them all sick.


	6. Who Knows a Use For Chinese Sitcoms?

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Why, Jake Jensen, alien, of course. In the original Cantonese, mind.  
> With efficient Losers-style raiding and shooting and explosions.  
> Yes, these are Clay's sociopaths at work.
> 
> More sections to come, when I have time to post them.

 

“Jensen, what kind of birds did you see at the ammo dump?” Clay repeats. 

Jensen casually names off a couple of older fixed-wing American craft, probably left behind by contractors during the Iraqi war, many many clicks south from here; and four newer Cessna models, usually beat to death by mining companies doing surveys; and a Bell 214ST helo that must have been used back in Iraq before the Shah was overthrown--but it’s big enough to have eighteen seats.  Good bet that it’s got lower mileage for its age, because it burns a lot more fuel, which isn’t cheap out here.  Long before Cougar’s time in the Army, but you still see them working out in places like this until they finally fall out of the air.  

Hell, if that thing flies, they might get all the civilians out.  Crammed together like cargo, not sitting nicely belted into a chair, but out. 

“So if we were going to fight a hundred guys--” Jensen says, making a throwing gesture toward the helo’s overhead, “-- _Pikachu,_  I choose  _you--”_  

“I’d like to avoid that, the odds are against it,” Clay says dryly. 

Cougar squints down at Jensen, annoyed.  “Sixty-two to eighty troops.” 

Jensen makes a little moue with those lips, shrugging. 

“Yeah, allowing for three watches with six-man units topside at their hole, right?  But not counting anybody at the ammo dump,” Clay says. 

Cougar turns his head.  “Correct.” 

“Helluva supply chain to feed all that,” Pooch says on the comm, which is no help  _at all._  

It just makes Cougar start thinking about cracking open an MRE for breakfast, and he won’t last all day on his remaining ration if he starts so soon.  They have to resplit shares for Jensen, who is probably a big eater.  Too long in the field, things are running short.  Cougar expects to go hungry. 

“So we can pick up some supplies at the depot,” Clay says easily. 

“Maybe they’ve got  _candy,_  Cougs?” Jensen says, grinning. 

He grunts.  So many questions, so few answers. 

“Depot guards are gonna hear us coming in this piece of crap, too,” Roque says. 

“So drop it down twenty klicks away, sneak up and steal a truck and come back for us,” Jensen says. 

“Says you,” Roque growls.  “Says you with the li’l feets all beat up.” 

“Yeah, I get all the fun,” Jensen says.

Cougar stirs, restive.  There’s problems with that plan.  Let’s see:  Somebody gets to trot twenty klicks carrying RPG-7s, side-arms, a machine pistol or two, and somebody’s Stoner Rifle, evade an undetermined number of guards on the ammo depot, steal a truck, drive it back to the old helo without drawing followers, and then drive back to the depot, encumbered with all the current passengers--returning to attack the stirred-up nest, leisurely pick out an aircraft, retrieve supplies like, oh, aviation fuel, and get back in the air successfully.  Somebody.  Right. 

Clay shakes his head. 

Now, if it’s Cougar and Pooch trotting out twenty clicks, Cougar can plink away, picking off sentries and maybe blow up some of that lovely ammo, evening up the odds until Pooch has a path to go in and take a look at the aircraft and pick one out.  One that doesn’t have too many bullet holes in it.  Which one he takes will have a big impact on further planning.  What kind of landing strip it has to have, for instance.  How much fuel it drinks.  Cougar hates that plan too.  Not enough recon, almost certainly not enough artillery. 

“Fucking nutball  _alien.”_  

“Yes sir, and what’s  _your_  name, sir?” Jensen asks. 

“I’m the guy who is going to cut it out of your fucking butt if you don’t give us accurate landmarks on this fucking ammo dump.” 

“Oh, you only had to ask, darling, please don’t be cross with me,” Jensen says. 

 _“Sir,”_ Roque growls. 

“Sir,” Jensen adds hastily. 

Roque must be really feeling rotten, letting things slide that badly.  Clay is looking back, concerned.  Then he looks at Cougar.   “We’ll need a diversion.” 

Cougar points his chin at Jensen.  “Chatter.” 

Clay smiles.  “He’ll have to be clever, on his own.” 

Cougar shrugs.  “Enough painkillers.” 

“Man, you are  _such_  a cold bastard,” Jensen scolds. 

“You have no idea,” Pooch says on the comm. 

It’s true they need all hands on deck for the depot assault, so Jensen will have to defend himself if anybody takes the bait.  But that’s not all. 

Arguable, that they ought to skedaddle now they have him, they really should haul his ass up to Bagram to answer questions.  He flew the damn thing,  _talked_  to it.  Just skip the risks of losing him on some silly rescue attempt--if CENTCOM knows anything about that ship, they’re going to want to debrief him until his brains dribble out his ears.  Possibly for years. 

Cougar’s not fond of leaving anybody to  _that_  treatment.  They’re on the same fucking side, dammnitall.  He glances up at Clay, who knows all that. 

Clay hoists one eyebrow, gazing at Cougar with his game face on. 

It’s a weird sensation, knowing what his CO is thinking, unspoken.  It’s not just teamwork, not just hauling boxes past each other in tight spaces, or anticipating which way somebody’s going to jump when the comm is down.  It’s intimate in a way that makes him want to  _squirm._   

Twisty bastard. 

Guarding Jensen doesn’t fit with Clay’s story about finding Jensen by accident.  The CO who never saw the diskie ship would leave Jensen behind now, risk losing him, ask him to do his best.   _That_ CO would much sooner believe the story about Russian scientists being held in some secret complex, because Jensen’s details on that will be far more believable.  Such prisoners might know more intel, be more valuable, than some  _non-pilot on hallucinogens_  who claimed to fly some bizarre ship. 

Plus, it gets Jensen off the hook a  _lot_ on the debriefing requirements.  It’s a kind of tough love mercy, risking his life instead of having months lost to unproductive interrogations. 

Clay’s gambling for Jensen having a future in the Losers.  Shit, that’s Clay’s face when they’re playing twenty-one and he has a pair of deuces. 

Cougar snorts. 

The corner of Clay’s mouth curls upward.  The bastard smirks worse than Cougar ever did, but no, Cougar is always the one who gets called on it when he thinks something is funny. 

Cougar shakes his head and starts digging in his backpack for his extra sidearms and an extra notepad and pens for Jensen to draw out the plans of the ammo depot and then the main complex where he was held.  Clay will want all of that done before they leave Jensen alone in the old helo, yelling out his presence to anybody who’s got ears on.  

They’re still turning over ideas on where to pick up a laptop for Jensen to do his own type of hoodoo.  If they can’t find one for Jensen at the depot, then they need one from somewhere else, like the upper level of that prison complex.  The Losers have done harder things in the past than that.  It’s so few Losers getting that many civilians out which will require skills. 

“Well, I do a pretty good pissed-off Cantonese grampa, kind of a Taiwanese accent.  Think that’ll confuse them enough to go chasing off looking for me?” 

“Couldn’t hurt,” Clay says, smiling wider.  Cantonese is the one foreign language shared by most of them, but they all are limited, and all sound funny to one another. 

Which is how it happens that Jensen broadcasts on an open channel, to a strictly limited area of Afghanistan, a detailed critique of the lack of local toilet facilities and the over-abundance of venomous wildlife, listing off the local poisonous snakes, including the species names in Latin.  He expounds on the lousy contents of broadcast news in the surrounding four countries, and recites what rarely-used veterinary medicines apply to which endemic goat diseases.  He explains the formula for fluids to rehydrate children sick with cholera or dysentery, using local measurements and supplies.  There are lots of odd sound effects for all this.  Lots of angry old Cantonese grampa noises, too. 

From diseases, he segues into entertainment on his broadcast.  He gives a translation of the classic slapstick sequence ‘Who’s on First’, and a very long rambling commentary comparing what he calls anime series from Japanese, Korean, and Taiwanese directors.  Then he does a shrill Punch and Judy routine in Cantonese, apparently moving his hands to do the puppets, smacking the seats beside him.  

It amuses Jensen to interrupt his own broadcast, making occasional noises of gagging, thumps and bangs, and cries for mercy in Pashto and in Ukrainian, of all things, as if his grumpy Chinese grampa has been subduing mercs or something by using some imaginary martial art.  He gives shrill war-cries that scale upward into dog whistle range, without any warning.  

“Ahhhyah!” Jensen yips, and there’s banging and crashing noises. 

“Don’t you go beating up my good headset,” Pooch warns. 

Some of the chop-socky yells sound suspiciously like his werewolf howls did. 

“Roque, you could be right,” Clay says, circling downwind around the battered collection of tin-sided sheds.  There’s even an old Quonset hut.  All these buildings have scorch marks, bullet holes.  Not exactly reassuring, in an ammo depot.  Also, no sign of fuel pumps or underground tanks.  There are trailer tracks with smudged lines of hose tracks, but it’s awfully dim and old.  Were they bringing it by hand, in  _cans?_  

“You mean, this damn FNG could be a goddamned  _fucking_  alien.  Too much TV as a kid,” Roque says. 

“Instead of good healthy gang fighting in the ‘hood,” Pooch says. 

“No, I meant this place.  Not enough going on out here.”  Clay hunches down with his binoculars. 

“You say that at casinos in Vegas with the strobes and buzzers and lights all going at once,” Roque says. 

“That’s just ‘cause he was losing,” Pooch says. 

“Gave me a headache, all that whizzing crap.” 

“That’s just ‘cause you drank too much.” 

“You blame that for everything.” 

“‘Cause it’s true, man,” Pooch says. 

Roque looks over at Cougar, who shrugs.   _If the shoe fits..._  

“Oh  _hell,_  I need to--” Roque growls.  There’s zipper noises. 

“You’re on your own for that, my man,” Pooch says.

“Yeah?  Fuck you,” Roque says. 

“Not when you stink like that,” Pooch says. 

“You are interrupting the show,” Jensen protests, still in Cantonese. 

“Fuck you too,” Roque says. 

“That’s just gross,” Pooch says, and there’s scuffling noises, meaning Pooch is not being careful and he’s moving too damn fast, likely to draw attention. 

“Speaking of grumpy old farts,” Jensen sails on in Cantonese.  He starts singing Broadway show tunes in translation, in falsetto, occasionally getting quite near the actual tune. 

“I can’t hear shit over your fucked-up singing,” Roque growls, observing no known radio discipline at all. 

“Turn your comm down, then, gentle sir, be one with the breeze, grasshopper, listen to the poisonous snakes in the grasses coming for you--” Jensen responds in Cantonese. 

Roque makes one of his gargling disgusted noises. 

Circling around the depot fence on foot, they spread out.  It still feels weird to encounter barbed wire fences in this place. 

They get lucky.  The depot crew has failed to clear the brush and rocks overlooking the compound.  The cover allows the Losers to crawl up really close to watch.  They’ve all got pretty good at lurking, even by Cougar’s standards.  Even with Pooch being careless. 

The next piece of undeserved luck is, Clay is right.  Nobody’s moving.  This lack of guards puzzles Cougar, since basic tactics would point at hostile forces taking the ammo depot first and then advancing on their cave compound.  From Jensen’s report, that guy Wade didn’t sound that amateur. 

 The Losers sit in the baking hot shadows and watch for awhile, but there’s only a skeleton crew left inside at the depot, only two guys strolling round the perimeter, and at that, they’re stopping together for long smoke breaks, gossipping.  Clay can eavesdrop well enough to translate their Russian.  Apparently something happened back at the main complex when Jensen escaped.  It’s something severe enough that the guards over at  _the Imam’s tomb_  called in all the reinforcements they had, took away more guys than they could really spare from the depot. 

Roque crawls away and lays down a line of his cheapest, nastiest IEDs out back, both to knock down the one empty hangar they’ve got outside the fence, and to draw the rest of the guards out.  Cougar and Clay inch up on the approaches from either end of the fence. 

Roque’s bombs crumple the hangar’s support pillars nicely. 

Cougar shoots the two Russian gossips first, and then the rest of the guys who emerge from their corrugated metal sheds at one end.  Clay cuts down those guards running out of a larger barracks-looking building at the other end of the compound.  There’s a dozen, total. 

The silence afterward says there’s no injured left.  Just fatalities. 

“Fish in a barrel,” Clay says, dissatisfied. 

None of the Losers trust it.  It’s too easy for the jobs they get.  From the names on their shirts and tags, most of the dead prove to be Armenians, Moldovans, and Ukrainians.  The mercs even had halfway decent gear.   But Pooch shakes his head, pointing out there’s not even a squawking voice left in the merc comm earpieces.  If they got off a warning to their bosses in some bunker, it’s radio silence now, and the Losers won’t know until they hear incoming ordnance. 

Roque turns over bodies, stripping useful comm gear and NVGs and guns and ammo, and he growls, recognizing some of the insignia.  He is loudly  _not sorry_  there’s no live ones left to answer questions.  “What size boots you want to put on over Jensen’s bandages?” 

Cougar points.  “Clothes too.”  Then Cougar hands Pooch a field pack full of comm gear, electronics and tools.  He finds a nut-covered energy bar in a dead guy’s pocket and pauses to clean his hands with an MRE wipe from the packet he always keeps in a pocket, as their designated medic.  He eats the Russian-issued bar, finding that it’s out of date enough to taste stale, while he’s looking at the other bodies that need to be searched. 

He offers the guy’s second nutbar to Pooch, who just stares at him.  “What?  It’s clean.” 

“You’re a sociopath, you know that, right?” 

Cougar looks at him under the hat brim.  “Got Clay’s rules.” 

Pooch snorts.  “There’s rules?” 

“Who we get to shoot.” 

Pooch wipes sweat off his face.  “Really?” 

“Or I wouldn’t stop.” 

“Well,  _that’s_ reassuring.” 

Cougar shrugs.  

“You know how troops fucking  _hate_  snipers?” Pooch says. 

Cougar smirks.  “We work at it.” 

“Yeah, now  _that_  I believe,” Pooch says, picking out tools from the pack.  “We really oughta give the rest of this junk to the alien, keep him happy playing with it.” 

Cougar tilts the hat slightly in question:   _How do you know it’d make him happy?_  

Pooch snorts.  “Have you listened to him?” 

Cougar snorts back at him. 

Pooch pulls out a flat packet of maps, exclaims at his luck. 

“This part was easy.”  Cougar scowls across the compound, looking at the fuel tank on a stand. 

“And you don’t trust  _easy,”_  Pooch says. 

“Never have,” Cougar says, and eats the second nutbar. 

“Maybe, all these jobs lately, you’ve been wearing that old ghillie suit a leeeetle too long?” 

Cougar starts filling his pockets with mags for the Russian sidearm he just lifted.  He checks the draw from his pocket a couple times, mutters a warning on the comm, tries out some test shots at a distant rock, and grunts in mild skepticism.  He doesn’t really  _trust_  any arms until he’s zeroed them out properly, but it’s nice to have something extra to wave around, even if it’s a hunk of junk.  

“Crooked as a trombone?”  Pooch says. 

“Okay for urban jobs.” 

Pooch shakes his head.  “Yeah, the man’s been wearing the weed-suit a leeetle too long, that’s all I gotta say about it.” 

They aren’t that lucky about the birds sitting on the rough minimal runway.  The crates are all in lousy shape.  No maintenance, as Pooch says.  Totally out of character for this kind of mercs; these must be recent replacements dumped in here when Wade found the previous crew unsatisfactory.  Cougar’s pretty sure he knows where to look for  _those_  remains. 

Yes, the mercs were hauling in their avgas in trucks and storing it in an aboveground tank on a stand that looks fairly insecure to Cougar, meaning,  _not sniper-resistant._  The legs of the stand could be easily shot apart by his M82.  That tank is nearly dry before they can fill the bigger older 214ST helo.  While Cougar and Clay are busy going through supplies at the site, Roque starts siphoning out fuel from the other birds.  No point in wasting it when they need every drop.  Besides, not so great for demolition purposes, as avgas is formulated to ignite only under high pressure and heat.  Cougar knows Roque always thinks in terms of what he can blow to bits in a hurry, and what is going to resist his efforts for too long during an op. 

They’re all twitchy at the slightest noises.  

Pooch takes four nerve-wracking hours to work on the 214ST helo.  Pooch declares it’s in better shape to start with than the old French helo serving as Jensen’s broadcast booth.  After they get a rough inventory and load up supplies into the 214ST, they start hauling the bodies away for burial in a trough dug with the depot’s odd off-brand road-grading dozer.  Clay looks over the bodies carefully, writes coded notes for his reports, has Cougar take scope-pictures for the record.  Then he says a few words over the bodies about respecting the dead, says he’s hoping the news of their deaths will get back to their families.  Then Roque refills the trench with the little tractor, looking angry.  He complains nobody’s going to say any respectful words over  _them_. 

Roque is always pissed off when he has to help bury the bodies and hide the mess they’ve made.  Pooch always gets puzzled why their SIC gets so mad.  But maybe Pooch has never heard Roque drunk enough to tell him  _those_  stories.  Roque has been through some bad shit.  He has dreams that the Losers will get shoveled up with a dozer scoop and buried in a heap, all tumbled together, stripped, robbed, missing bits here and there, and nobody is standing there who cares. 

 _Of course not,_  Cougar told him once, drunk as a skunk, thinking it was funny.  

He got a fine red knife-scratch around his neck that he’s not going to forget in a hurry.  That fucker is _fast,_ drunk or not.  It meant Roque knows him right down to the half-inch, and likes him, or else that wouldn’t have been a  _warning_  scratch. 

Cougar is not sure why it matters to Roque.  They’d be dead.  If the beliefs of Cougar’s grandmothers are remotely factual, he’d have other obligations claiming his attention in a big way.  If the Señoras are wrong, if the atheists are right and there is no hereafter, there won’t be anything left to care.  If he becomes a ghost left drifting around, he still won’t have anything much to say about it, one way or the other. 

Later on, not so bombed out of his mind, after he cleaned up the cut on his neck, Cougar explained a little to Roque.  Cougar was honest enough to say that his family all think he’s got a secret deathwish, going off on such missions.  They believe he’s clever enough that he could get out of such duties if he tried harder, so he must be asking the bad guys to kill him.  Suicide by Taliban guerrillas.  It’s a mortal sin, trying to get himself killed. 

Roque had snorted.  “Sure.  Like the Army would ever let  _you_  go, snipercat.  You ever lose Clay covering your back, they’re gonna hand you off to the Company, forever and ever amen, and they’re gonna  _fuck with you_  until they lose you.  Just how it is, man.” 

Then he slid a look at Cougar and added, “Yeah, people have told me to stop bein’ such a fucking perky cheerful optimist.”  He went on to recite, in dry merciless detail, about the conversations other COs have tried to have with Roque about his  _defeatist attitudes._ Oh yeah, and his drinking. 

By the end of that, they were both laughing too hard to talk.  Roque has really had some doozies to work with. 

It goes right back to Roque’s very first supervisor at the cemetery, who told some pretty astonishing stories of his own.  But that’s why Roque knew how to make sure a grave settled properly.  After smoothing out the mound for the grave, then Roque crashes the dozer into the flimsy buildings and ruins supplies that Clay doesn’t want anybody else using.  

Roque waits until Pooch is sure they can take off before he blows the sturdier buildings and wires up the birds they’re leaving behind.  One barracks building gets left as backup shelter for rescued civilians, just in case. 

When they get back to Jensen, it turns out some of those grunting chopsocky noises were not, in fact, faked.  

They’d left him there alone, injured, being the distraction, and he’d succeeded in that, all right.  He didn’t give  _anybody_  a peep of warning on the comm. 

That made Clay yell at him a bit, in that tired older brother way that would wring tears from stone.  He’s good at that.  He says things about how Jensen needs to let them know these kinds of problems, they’ve got his back, they’ll take care of him, stop hiding big stuff like a whole squad of mercs trying to get at his position. 

Jensen doesn’t grizzle or sniffle or anything.  He just waves his hands and rambles on a bit--something about My Little Ponies again--and admits he was just trying to hold up his end, make sure they didn’t have to come back for him too early, before they got settled with a new bird and supplies.  

Then Clay made him talk about the sequence of actions that led to the bloody mess around the old French helo.  Turned out, some of the mercs had been sent out from somewhere else to track down Jensen’s signal.  He talked his visitors round in Cantonese, fooled them, shot them, whacked them on the head.  Fought them on his knees, because he couldn’t use his feet.  He has arms like an orangutan when it comes to surprise-bopping maneuvers, something to remember if any of the Losers got angry at him. 

Finally, he’d used some of the RPG-7s to blow the bad guys’ aircraft out of the sky where it kept buzzing him.  Odd.  Why hadn’t the mercs just dropped something explosive on the old helo and silenced the whole problem?  Also, Cougar wonders where that plane came from, because it wasn’t from the runway at the ammo depot.  They’d have heard that as they came up on approach. 

“Fucking hell,” Roque says.  

“Lookit this one, nailed between the eyes.”  Pooch whistles.  Yeah, he’s not that sorry. 

Clay just looks around, pleased.  “You didn’t say you’d been through some decent training.” 

“Hate to brag,” Jensen says, but he’s looking at Cougar. 

Cougar takes a good long look around at the evidence, and nods once.   He looks up at Clay, tilts his hat a little. 

“Yeah, we’re keeping this tech,” Clay says briskly, and gestures for Cougar to pick up the other end of a dead guy.  They don’t have a dozer out here, piling up a cairn of rocks out of sight in a bit of secondary canyon will have to do.  That takes awhile too. 

When they’re done cleaning that up, back at the helo, Cougar opens an MRE and uses some of the wipes on his hands, passes an extra one to Clay.  Pooch grabs the MRE from under his hand and hauls it away outside with a determined look.  Cougar glances down to see Jensen watching all this, amused. 

Cougar looks down at Jensen, picks up a bottle of water, uncaps it, pushes it into Jensen’s hand.  Then he rummages for a bucket-shaped object, brings a couple of different possibilities, holds them near Jensen to check for practical fit.  Discards a jagged metal one. 

Jensen, astonishingly, turns bright pink.  “You know I  _could_  really manage without--” 

Cougar tilts the hat, looking around.  Everybody else climbs out of the old helo, carrying boxes of Roque’s RPG-7s as they go.  He folds up next to Jensen, waves a hand at the offered buckety things. 

“Shit, man--” 

Cougar smiles.  “That’s the idea.” 

“So you can talk!” 

“Sniper.  Trained recall.  Nobody likes having their versions corrected.” 

“Oh man, tell me about it!  You know how ASPIE-spectrum folks get all hyper-focused on weird details, and reciting that stuff just really gets on people’s nerves?  Well--” 

Cougar pulls over a stack of tissue-thin paper nearby, probably some kind of flight records or receipts.  They’re not terribly clean, but they’ll do.  Then he pulls out some more wet wipes.  “Shit,” he says bluntly.  “While you can.” 

Jensen blinks at him.  “You just came out and _said_  that?” 

Cougar holds up two fingers.  Then he taps his watch, waves at the cabin door.  Next, he points at the MRE bags on the seat next to him.  Rumor said you wouldn’t take a dump for a week  _after_  you got back to eating real food.  Rumor was proving depressingly right so far.  Well, ignoring Roque’s current discomfort.  Probably not infectious, or they’ll all have that problem by now. 

“Well, sir, I just-- I guess we will do that now.”  Jensen wallows around, struggles onto his knees.  Cougar offers to leave him alone, but Jensen holds out a frantic hand.  Cougar grips it.  “Right, kneel up, get the pants down, grab onto the Cougster’s shoulders, let’s try sliding in the oil bucket under me for the first pass-- God, this is so fucking humiliating, when a beautiful guy is trying to--” 

“Trained as a medic.  Had my own bedpan sometimes too.” 

“Yeah?  God, you don’t have near enough scars for how well you shoot--” 

“Neither do you.”  Cougar looks into those distracted blue eyes.  They’re still dilated differently, by a fraction of a hair.  He doesn’t even need a penlight to see that. 

“Stop with the gun barrel stare. You could just ask,” Jensen says in a shaky, jokey voice.  He must have a bladder like a horse, he is still peeing and peeing and peeing. 

“Pain?” 

“Umm, yeah, the diskie ship good stuff is just-- wearing off pretty much--”  he grimaces, struggling.  Papers scatter.  “--guess they weren’t real big on the food hygiene either, man--” 

Cougar shifts his chin to point at his backpack, rather than disturb Jensen’s grip on his shoulders.   “Got stuff.  Easy.  I’ll let you down.” 

“And you won’t tell the Looey that the recreational fun is all worn off and I’m just loopy this way without any help?” Jensen lifts one hand free at a time, yanking the boxers up, then the pants. 

Cougar smiles.  “Clay knows it anyway.  He’s a Colonel.  Roque is a Looey.”   When he says Roque’s name, he touches his eye and then he moves one hand like he’s filleting a fish. 

“Oh God.”  Jensen eases down onto his side, with help, and takes a moment to zip his pants.  “Roque?  So Roque is a Looey.  What are you?” 

“Sergeant,” Cougar says, holding out wipes to clean their hands. 

 _“Sir,”_ Jensen says. 

Cougar tilts the hatbrim in acknowledgement.  He digs out pills for pain and for digestive upset that aren’t either dysentery or cholera--Jensen’s  _tourista_  is not that severe, Cougar has treated both of those conditions.  Then he whistles for somebody to come back and help him lift Jensen across to the new helo.  Clay shows up, locks wrists with Cougar for a chair carry.  

Jensen may be damned heavy, but he’s not bulky enough.  He ought to weigh a lot more, as tall as he is, with shoulders that wide.  Cougar is already thinking about what kind of training Jensen needs to build up his strength and speed properly, get him started on it with upper body work until those feet are healed up. 

Clay reads his mind easily, of course.  Clay mentions routines they’ve used before when Pooch had knee injuries.  Cougar tilts his hatbrim, agreeing.  He’s a little distracted.  He knows what kind of muscle-building that Jensen’s body is probably capable of, with the kind of build he already has.  Jensen could develop a boxer’s punch-resistant abs with just the minimal amount of work, nothing like as much effort as Roque or Cougar put in all the time.  

Stateside, with those feet healing up, they could start Jensen training on the pull-up wall they’ve built at the house that the Losers rent off-base.  The monkey bars get a lot of midnight use too, when somebody can’t sleep.  The House of Bad Dreams, as Cougar’s sisters call it. 

Roque steps up into the new helo.  “Here, kid, this what you wanted?”  He lays down a thick boxy laptop onto the seat next to Jensen’s hip.  Then he lays down the comm backpack Pooch was looking at earlier. 

Jensen gives a happy little crooning noise, pats the laptop.  “Oooh, sir, you make me sooo happy, yes you do, sir--” 

Roque makes a grimace and departs hastily.  He’s moving too fast, so Cougar can’t quite hear him muttering about fucking aliens. 

Clay glances up and grins, tipping his head in that direction.  Cougar gives a shrug. 

“Think that’ll help out?” Clay asks Jensen. 

“Yes sir, it will indeed.”  Jensen is humming about werewolves again.  “Good old ThinkPads, you can’t kill these things with a meat ax.  Got ‘em up in the Space Station, you know.  Oooh, come tell me all the gossip, sweet thing.” 

Clay snorts and departs after Roque, shaking his head. 

Jensen pulls the thick case down onto his middle, starts to unwind the cables wrapped around the outside of it.  “Oh yes, somebody was doing mining surveys, weren’t they?  And a wireless access program, very nice.”  Then he’s humming some tune Cougar doesn’t know.  Those few bits and pieces of the words that emerge make it sound like it belongs on a children’s show.  Something about ponies again.  “What?  You’re giving me the eyebrow again.” 

“You can open it?” 

“Already done, beautiful.  Like coming home.  I grew up on these babies.  Plus, some mining companies slap on all kinds of security--the oil folks are just nuts, right? --but others, naaaah.  Nada, nithing, no security at all.  Just pass ‘em out like playing cards, anybody in the IT shop can pop these open and reassign ‘em to the next guy.  So, they treat ‘em like playing cards, too, beat ‘em and lose ‘em and downright destroy ‘em.”  Jensen pauses to sing a few bars of the Paul Simon song,  _Fifty Ways to Leave Your Lover._  

_“You Just slip out the back, Jack_

_Make a new plan, Stan_

_You don't need to be coy, Roy_

_Just listen to me_

_Hop on the bus, Gus_

_You don't need to discuss much_

_Just drop off the key, Lee_

_And get yourself free...”_  

Satisfied that Jensen is occupied for the time being, Cougar ferries more boxes from the old chopper into the new one.  Roque and Clay help him, swapping off on keeping watch.  He stands a brief watch while they stop to eat.  When Cougar finally pauses to sit down and drink some water and finally open an MRE pouch, Jensen is still talking as if he’s never left. 

“This little old Thinkie is real low on juice, at a guess somebody lost their local power converter and gave up on it.  They think it’s dead, Jim, but we know better, don’t we?  Yes we do.” 

Cougar offers him a Russian-packed version of the MREs, unopened. 

Jensen blinks at it.  “You know, it’s weird, but I haven’t been hungry at all.  And I’m a growing boy, usually I like to eat.  I’d kill for a soda.  Now, candy, that’d be good too.” 

Cougar opens both bags, looks at what’s on offer, wipes off his hands with the sissy wipes, and starts pouring in bottled water to heat things up.  He doesn’t make a face about it.  He just offers Jensen the candy and the energy bars, while he eats the rest.  It really should be the other way round, Jensen needs the protein, but Cougar is hungry now.  He’s hoping that Jensen will eat better once his liver has cleared whatever drugs he was given. 

Jensen gives him a thoughtful look.  “You’re too skinny as it is, beautiful, you guys been going short out here?” 

Cougar shrugs.  “Beats locusts.”

Jensen starts to laugh around his mouthful of candy.  “Le soup du jour es scorpion juice, le appetizer es saute de potato bug, the entree es la fillet de grasshopper--”  His French accent is just as awful as his Spanish, totally unlike his excellent command of Cantonese.  He looks so white he glows in the dark, but claims he is better at Asian languages.  Weird. 

Cougar opens another bottle of water, holds it out to Jensen.  Cocks up a warning eyebrow. 

“Okay, okay, but we’ll just end up right back at the bucket again, you know that, right?” 

Cougar shrugs. 

“You just want to see my peepee, right?  Or just make sure I’ll keep shitting my guts out?” 

Cougar pushes the bottle at Jensen’s arm firmly. 

“God, you are so bossy.  Ouch!   All right,  _fine,_  I’ll drink it, okay.” 

Cougar watches him grapple with the programs on the computer, and reminds him to drink more water every ten minutes.  Even the Russian quasi-MREs are salty as hell. 

“Anyway, other people may fail at their power-fu, but not us--” he breaks into a Power Rangers cry.  Then he yodels out another werewolf yell. 

That makes Pooch exclaim in the cockpit.  “Jeez, warn a guy, will you?” 

“Idiota,” Cougar says to Jensen, and pushes at the water bottle until it starts to spill. 

“Oooh, not here, sweetie, people might see.”  But he drinks some more of it.  “Anyway, Sergeant Cougar, sir,  _we_  are not tech-phobic idiots who can’t finagle our way out of a Stone Age Afghan village.  Plus--” 

“Iron Age,” Cougar says. 

Jensen blinks at him. 

Cougar makes a toasting-speech gesture with his own water bottle, and drinks deeply. 

“Pooch, your sniper is cracking  _jokes,”_ Jensen says. 

Pooch leans out of the cockpit and gives his toothiest horror-movie grin.  “Yeah, he does that all the time.  Most people don’t get... time... to...  _notice.”_  

“Well, pppp--p-ppop me in a bb-b-b-bassinet and ccc-c-call me Baby Herman,” Jensen stutters out, exaggerating it. 

“You sound enough like a Toon  _without_ working at it,” Pooch snaps right back at him. 

“I’m not a Toon, I’m just drawn that way,” Jensen says. 

Pooch snorts and goes back to fiddling with the cockpit fuses.  “Coulda fooled me.” 

 _“Alien,”_ Cougar says in a teacher-voice, correcting them. 

Pooch cracks up. 

Jensen stares up at him, mouth open. 

“Too many flies,” Cougar says sternly, and taps Jensen’s chin. 

Jensen bawls out a loud laugh and hugs himself, laughing until tears run from his eyes.  It really isn’t that funny, but he’s just laughing until he whoops. 

“You all right, man?” Pooch asks, leaning out to see better. 

Jensen flaps a hand, giggling.  Finally wipes his eyes.  “Well, shit, where were we, sir?” 

“Finagle,” Cougar says firmly.  He points at the laptop. 

“Yeah, power-fu finagling.   _We_  have a lovely big passenger Bell helo with just the right kind of 60-cycle powerplant from its native habitat.  So you’ll just need to wrangle the other end of this cable into a power outlet, if you please, sir.  Thank God somebody tied up the cords on it.  No playing with sat feeds until it’s been plugged in awhile.”  Jensen makes a sad face. 

Cougar hoists up a warning eyebrow at Jensen’s bottle. 

Jensen sighs, and gulps down some big swallows of water. 

Cougar holds out one hand, and Jensen surrenders the laptop.  Cougar finds a socket up in the cockpit, where the cable is too short to reach Jensen.  Pooch grumbles about it being in his way, but finds room for the laptop next to Pooch’s backpack in a cargo net.  “This better be worth it,” Pooch growls, juggling a bag of the much-hated MRE chicken fajitas while he’s scribbling a checklist from memory.  He won’t try the Russian stuff until they’ve worked out what’s under the various labels, even if  _nothing_  could be as bad as the chicken he’s eating.   “Don’t you be giving  _me_  the eyebrow!” 

Cougar can hear Jensen laughing.  He just touches his hatbrim in salute to Pooch, and gets the hell out of the pilot’s way. 

He heads back to the boxes of rations Roque took from the depot.  No candy, sadly, but he knows what to look for on some of the Russian-labeled things, some of those are decent.  Others are a lot worse than average MREs.  He opens up another one for himself--he’s still hungry, dammit--and shows another one in Jensen’s hands.  He even gives Jensen all the treats.  

Then Cougar stretches out across two seats--somebody sawed away the armrests long ago, probably for cargo--and pulls the hat down close over his face, and almost closes his eyes.  They need the rest.  His eyes get tired in the bald glare of the rocks out there. 

Once Jensen finishes eating, he starts scribbling maps on the paper Cougar gave him.  He mutters and groans and erases and talks to himself between spasms of humming. 

_“...She said why don't we both_

_Just sleep on it tonight_

_And I believe in the morning_

_You'll begin to see the light...”_  

Satisfied that task will keep him busy, Cougar closes his eyes all the way.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Fanon sometimes has it that Jake Jensen knows various Asian languages better than he knows Spanish. I am not aware if the Losers comicverse hints at this or not.


	7. Mission Planning, with History

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sometimes all that advance work doesn't matter at all, but they do it anyway. Teamwork? Well, there's always more back story on these things.

“So, guys, what else have we got on this underground bunker?”  Clay is passing sheets of scribbled maps to Roque.  Jensen wrote his labels in square block letters, no caps.  Pretty darn indicative of growing up programmer. 

Also, not a great habit while undercover, unless you’re playing a computer geek, and that’s not a role Cougar can sustain for long when he’s parked in front of an actual keyboard by large guys with guns.  There’s only so long you can randomly type Cyrillic alphabets, flip between screens, slowly write out nonsense notes, and peer myopically. 

Odd, how that lettering style brings up more bad memories than they ought to.

“Why the fuck do we need to know where the kitchen is?” Roque growls.

“Tools,” Jensen says cheerfully.  “Never underestimate the power of a pissed-off cook.  Learned that from my sister.”

“I don’t even want to know,” Pooch says.

“You know those giant tubs they use?  Well, you’d be surprised what you can do with one of those.  Plus, like, you know, forks, tongs, butcher knives.  Big ones.  You like those, right?”  Jensen starts singing Darth Vader’s theme song from _Star Wars._ Probably the version in _The Empire Strikes Back._  

At that moment Cougar kind of hates the part of his brain that knows where all this stuff comes from.

“Could haul your sorry lame ass on one of those kitchen trolley carts,” Roque says, which is downright approval.

They all pause to contemplate the image of Roque crashing around in underground corridors pushing Jensen along on a cafeteria trolley, armed with a laptop.

Jensen gives a blinding grin.

Pooch groans.

Clay’s got that crazyman smile on his face again.

Cougar tilts down his hat brim, refusing to make any comment at all.  Some days, it’s just not worth it.

“Okay, what else have we got to work with, out here?” Clay says.

Roque recites a comprehensive list of ready weapons, boxed weapons, and food supplies.  Give their SIC that, he’s good at that part of things.

“Pooch?”

“Shit-all and a coupla jackrabbit pellets,” Pooch says, scowling at his topo maps.  “We got a quarter tank of gas in the bird, we got no GPS, we got no broadcast chatter to go by, we got no numbers stations, nothing-- we’re sitting in a radio shadow where they can’t see us either, right?  Just like you wanted.  And yeah, Roque, the radio does work.”  It’s a snarl of wires and duct tape hanging on the front panel, the ugly but functional product of cooperation between Pooch and Jensen, done while Cougar was halfway napping.  Jensen can do a surprising amount of things on his knees.  There’s jokes now.

“So if we do want a signal--” Clay says.

“Yeah, if we want Jensen’s help on the comm or ask him to go find stuff on a sat link, we gotta haul him outside, go on up along that track a ways,” Pooch says. 

“Right, got it.  What did you find on the maps?”

Pooch does transpo, he digs maps as much as Cougar does, and they’ve both gone over the stuff from the dead guy’s backpack.  Pooch holds out a map section that’s shredding at the fold marks.  “This scale is too coarse to show that pinnacle Jensen was talking about, but I think _the Imam’s tomb_ is probably out front, and they’ve sunk their hole right about here, if the squiggle here is that rock face Jensen says sits right next to it.”

“Looks like George’s nose on a fucking dollar bill,” Roque says.  He says that about every bit of steep map elevations he doesn’t like.  He’s a big guy, so he rarely thinks about the advantages of height.  Climbing up the back side and rappelling down that rock face to find the other cave openings is not the first entry method he thinks of.  Not like Cougar, who is always looking for the best viewpoint.  Cougar’s pack is heavy with the ropes and harness he always carries, not just backup mags and scopes and bipods and medical gear.  Rope enough for urban climbing, though, not for three hundred-foot cliffs without stopping to retrieve his cams and pitons.

Roque can climb all day, like a total robot, but it’s not something he enjoys.  No, Roque is biased toward smashing into the front door.  Steal a heavy truck and drive it into whatever barrier they’ve got, if he can’t sneak up and blow the damn hinges off first.

Pooch will be biased toward driving sedately up to the guard shack and _bullshitting_ his way in.  Clay glances around and gives a little smile.  Oh, he knows all this about the Losers.  Hell, they know all this about one another.  Clay has that crazy gleam in his eye.  “We could tackle ‘em with a couple different things outta our bag of tricks, guys, hit them at the same time.  So, what, Pooch, that cliff is about four, five clicks from here?”

“Yeah, and maybe I parked too close.  Probably somebody heard us coming if they were paying attention, but I’m not gonna hear ‘em coming back at us until they drive up around that bend there.”

“If all you guys have to go in, I can sit on watch out front of Pooch, help you guys remotely--call me, I can pass the intel I come up with--”  Jensen’s fingers tap on his knees. 

At a guess, Jensen is biased toward pulling tricks with picking locks at back doors.

Pooch just shakes his head.  “We’re falling off the raggedy edge of coverage.  All the techs we’ve ever had out here, they told us they can’t find a satellite signal, let alone jack into one.  You’re not gonna be--”

“But I can jack into satellites out here easy, man, have been nailing them all day.  Clearly you guys haven’t worked with somebody who knows what they’re doing!”

“Uh huh,” Pooch says.

“That antenna you built helps a lot.”

Pooch grunts, as if insulted.  _Of course_ it would help.  Why else would he build it?

“Man, this is a tough crowd,” Jensen grumbles.  He can certainly sit keyboarding in just about any crazy position with his feet propped up--and he has been, once he got an hour’s charge into the laptop.  Until they settled down into this bit of cover, he was trying to trace money and phone contacts.  With Jensen’s help, they might be able to get some on-the-fly intel searches--and they might need it.

“Recon first,” Cougar says.  It’s what snipers do.  Mostly, it happens way out in advance of their fire teams, not right there mushed all together in the mission itself, the way the Losers do it.

“You’re just a greedy bitch,” Roque says.

Jensen is staring between them.

Cougar lets one corner of his mouth curl up.  “I share.”

“Yeah, on turfing _sentries,”_ Roque says.

Cougar gives a little shrug.  He’s got nothing against three or foursomes, but Pooch doesn’t ever play around without Jolene, Clay’s women are always too crazy to handle any other gals in the room, and Roque pulls the kind of gal who goes for prison tats and giant muscles, not skinny guys who don’t talk.  He can’t help it if he usually pulls girls who find Roque a little... intimidating.  They ought to _prefer_ Roque, the guy’s got all kinds of assets going for him that Cougar will never have, starting with his rank, his salary, his education in chemistry, and his boxing weight.  And then there's _other_ kind of assets, totally glutes from hell.  All that corrective exercise he insists on making other guys do means he’s running backward, yelling, while they’re running forward, or he’s _standing_ on them while they do push-ups.  Well, all the knives, they worry some folks.  They’re supposed to.

Roque’s KA-BAR is just for show with FNGs, he only bloods his knives on _serious_ targets.  But it took most new guys quite awhile to learn that.  Cougar figured it out in his first week, when he got mad and took it away from Roque with a well-placed chicken kick.  They ended up breaking Roque’s knuckles and some of Cougar’s toes and sprained his knee.  Redecorated the scar on Roque’s eye with a fresh split over the bruise, too.  But Roque shocked Cougar by just pounding on him, he never pulled a single cut, when his rep had him dicing guys like potatoes.  Or artistically, like a jack o’ lantern.

That’s because he liked Cougar from the get-go--another thing you learn when you’re both smashed like Halloween pumpkins.  Then too, Roque didn’t do any of the things he was _supposed to do_ about being struck by a subordinate.  He didn’t file reports as he should have.  He didn’t call Clay, he made Cougar do that. 

He just seemed _pleased_ to find out Cougar had a temper and a damned hard skull and Cougar would give him a decent goddamn fight.  “No point in shipping out with wussies who can’t even give you a hard time.”

No, what their damned SIC did in revenge was to keep everybody else away while the two of them healed up.  Roque got Clay to extend Pooch’s trip home to Jolene, and he got Clay to visit CENTCOM the way they kept asking, instead of coming back right away from DC.  That was it, nobody else hanging around to tell tales.  By then they didn’t _have_ any tech guy, the last one hastily transferred out with Clay’s blessing because he feared and Clay feared and the General feared that the team would eat him in little pieces raw without dipping sauce or anything.  Given the tech’s lousy goldbricking attitude and poor performance in the field, he was unlikely to make it onto the next field before somebody maybe lost their temper en route.  Possibly in a high place over a long drop--naming no names.

So it was just the two of them at the house, Roque and Cougar, crippling around by themselves.  Nobody ever needed to know the really bitchin’ details.  Cougar had to help Roque into his shirts for two weeks and bandage the man’s eye for him, and worse yet, explain to Clay on the phone why there were crutches.

“Fell down the stairs, my ass,” Clay said dryly.  Nobody had to tell him that Roque threw Cougar over the banister just to get him _away,_ make Cougar _stop._   Start a fight, never.  Finish it, hell yes.  Just keep _kicking_ until all the lights go out.

Two weeks at CENTCOM got Clay in more trouble than any five missions combined, so Clay has never, ever let it die.  There are still sly little digs about _stairs_ that make the Losers laugh but nobody else gets it.  There were jokes about crutches, about neutering the tomcat to improve his temper.  There are _still_ gag gifts of cat litter and jeweled collars with bells, and cat boxes.  Cougar doesn’t mind, there’s always crazy neighborhood cat ladies who will need the things.  In places like Aleppo and Jo-berg and the backend of nowhere Mozambique, there’s always cat ladies.  Cougar knows how to track the feral cats back to the cat ladies, even the very shy ones, who only talk in signs.  He’s got good reason to find them too--they always know all the local shenanigans.

Cougar has never forgot the SIC of his unit can make his life an utter misery.  God She only knows how Roque got hold of that little key in Cougar’s psyche that will drive him like a damn beater of a car, sputtering all the way.  It’s that same key his grandmother and his aunts use, that little soft guilt-voice he usually hears in church.  Recovering at the house, Roque _made_ Cougar work on both his own exercises and work with Roque on his.  He made Cougar help him with the housework and do all the laundry, he _made_ Cougar help him fix the holes in the wallboard and repaint--while he was in the arm cast and Cougar was on crutches.  Since then, Roque hasn’t picked up that key often.  He has the absolutely demonic patience to save it up, use it sparingly.  So it still works, dammit.  And they both know it works.  Roque never needs to _use_ it.  It just sits there silently between them, part of the history they never talk about.

So all the damage to the house off-base got dealt with, just the two of them repainting everything before anybody else got back.  Then, because they had the time, Roque sorted out building the pull-up wall and the monkey bars and the high bars in the back yard, which would be time well-spent if it wasn’t done while Cougar was able to stand for about ten minutes and Roque had to hammer nails with his off-hand.   And yeah, there were a couple of slapfights where they worked out some things that were impossible to talk about, and more than a couple of screaming matches at night where one guy’s bad dreams woke up the other guy yelling, with the gun safety off.  With bonus, more plaster holes to patch.

Roque admitted, during that week, that nobody said boo to them about Cougar.  The units who’ve borrowed him for longer ops, the units who knew Cougar, were never going to adopt the sniper for their teams.  Cougar’s bad habits all hit at night.  “God help you if you touch him before he wakes up”, sounded pretty darn normal for a black ops soldier, the only warning Roque got. 

On leave, Cougar likes to pick up people to sleep with because they make demands and keep him awake, so he can’t have the dreams then.  This is why Clay doesn’t fuss about the risks of his catting around.  Left too long stuck on base with no mission to soak it up, that’s when all that built-up pressure erupts.

Turns out the silent guy will cut loose with blood-curdling panther screams that can wake the dead, or anybody living within three blocks of the place.  And then he starts flailing, fighting the things he’s seeing.  He’s just cogent enough to strike at anybody who gets too close.  As it happens, he’s even faster with a gun when he’s jackknifing up off the bed firing almost blind.  That trick saved the lives of his teammates a couple times, so nobody fusses.  Much.

It was Roque, during that time alone with the crazy man screaming and growling and clawing marks in the goddamn _floor,_ who worked out rules on how to wake Cougar up safely, how to get him to stop kicking your guts out while you have to hold him off, how to make him snap out of the flashbacks and start responding to words.  Roque can sit for hours, patiently talking down a guy who’s climbed up into the rafters, when the crazy guy can’t even stand up without his damn crutches.

Roque already had that little mental key ready in his hand by then, and he _made_ Cougar climb down again.  He sat it out all night, waiting, until Cougar crawled back down to him.  Crawled back down to get smacked and sworn at and squeezed until his ribs creaked.

“Crazy sunuvabitch, you’re not getting out of it that easy, you know that now, right?  You’re fucking around dancin’ at the mouth of hell, Cougar, you dumbass fucktard, I’m gonna reach out my big black fist and grab your skinny ass outta there and I’m gonna spank you back to life until your butt is on fucking fire if I have to.  You got that? and stop wheezing like that.  If you’re gonna cry then fucking _do it_ and cry like a fucking man and give it to me right, bawl that shit outta you, just be _honest.”_

Cougar has never forgot that patience, as deranged as he was at the time.  So he has no problems returning the favor when Roque needs somebody to keep people away from him until he calms down, or sit listening when Roque is drunker than an armadillo’s eyeball, or bailing him out of jail or hold off a pack baying for blood when he’s gone out brawling by himself.  Cougar just scolds him for not taking company to watch his back.  Well, not in words.  There’s some high-proof glaring and the most disapproving of his hat tilts:  _I am not speaking to you, dumbass, you know better than this._

These days, nobody asks why Cougar can get a drunken pissed-off Roque to settle down and walk away from problems.  Well, Cougar’s pretty sure their SIC has _never_ forgot how high Cougar can pogo _one-legged_ up a wall before he kicks somebody. 

By now, the Losers trust it without discussion:  Cougar covers high ground.  The arguments are over who covers the rest and how fast they move.

“Grab a Humvee or something, roll it out quiet, bring it back, grab Jensen, roll it back out there, quiet,” Roque says, jerking a thumb at Jensen.  “We can haul more munitions in a Humvee, too.”

Clay chuckles.  “Sure, if you’re at the back _pushing_ this time,” he says.

Roque rolls his eyes.

Cougar glances up at Jensen.  “Hangar doors?”

Jensen nods.  “The lil diskie ship got those open before I even got down there, no idea how.  Probably fried the computerized lock codes on it.  They were hanging crooked when we bumped out.  Not a quick fix, for sure.  Probably still open.  But they might’ve nailed up barriers on the inner doors.”

Cougar nods.  He looks at Pooch, makes a diving gesture with his hand.  “Take civilians out that way.”

“Oh, now you’re getting _weird,”_ Pooch says.

Clay nods.  “Split up the civilians.  Put the ones who can hike and use guns into trucks.  Some of them can drive the rest out.  Just take the sick and disabled on the helo.  Use the helo to guard the convoy.”

Pooch nods.  “Okay, that reduces the load a lot.”

“Didn’t this kinda shit end up in some World War Two movie?” Roque says.

“Probably where he got the idea,” Pooch says, jerking a thumb at Cougar.  “But no choppers.”

“But didn’t the Sikorsky R-4s come out in 1944?  I read that they worked places like Burma and Alaska--” Jensen says, frowning.  There’s a man who takes his trivia seriously.

“Yeah, but not as regular transpo until the Korean War,” Pooch says, patient about it.

“There’s always M.A.S.H., the king of them all.  Both the movie and the tv series, I mean.”  Jensen’s fingers tap impatiently on his knees.  “But the dates, man, it’s right on the tip of-- damn, I hate being off the grid.”

“Get used to it, kid,” Clay says.


	8. When the Plan Hits the Rocks

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sure, people think it shows something about your inner soul when you have the drop on somebody. But maybe it's far more mission critical when they totally and completely have the drop on you.

Cougar adjusts the bipod under his gun, gently cranks the camera/scope along the Picatinny rail suspended over the barrel, and squints hard. Then he relaxes, gazes through the viewfinder.  He takes three magnified pictures of the dozen mercs yelling in headlight glare, outlined in front of one of their remaining trucks.  They’re only a hundred and fifty feet below him.  While he can lipread them just fine through the scope, they are speaking something that might be Serbian, some dialect he doesn’t know well enough to follow their verbal argument.  The gestures are pretty plain.  He could mow down most of the group with his first burst on this gun.  Of those who’d scatter, he can promise to pick off at least six more before the others raise the alarm.  But that would be an open declaration of war, causing a fuss.  Or, possibly, a decent distraction.

He’s made good time so far, he’s ahead of the others far enough that he doesn’t want to blow the op before Clay and Roque have got into position to bomb their way into the front door down there.  The whole organization looks much bigger here, on the ground, than they planned from Jensen’s estimates.  The Losers still don’t know exactly how many mercs of any skill remain holed up inside the complex.

He’s not seeing skilled amongst that lot waving their arms at each other.  All the wild gestures down there by the truck are proof the driver is missing.  They can’t find some of their guys, and apparently nobody wants to climb up in the rocks to go looking for all the bodies.  Chaos, when they found one mess on this side of the rocks, dropped from fifty feet above them with a garrote wire around his neck.  Somebody wants to panic them, and it’s not one of the Losers.  Not their style.  Roque will grapple if he has to, but he’d finish it with a blade. If he wanted panic, he’d blow something up.  Clay would just shoot them.  So Cougar is a little concerned about overcrowding up here on his climbing pitch.

He waits it out doing camera time, recording faces.  Somebody is going to need the records, eventually.  When he sees one and then another guard standing by themselves, vulnerable in positions less likely to give away where the shot came from, he adjusts his scope, careful about noise, and takes them down.  When the first one is discovered, more chaos--and he takes down three more.  He’s pushing his luck by then.  He takes down the bipod and clips the sling tight so the rifle stock lays flat against his ribs, next to his backpack.  He can swing the gun around on its swivels and shoot like that, he’s practiced often enough, but that’s still slow and inaccurate by his standards.

Cougar is rappelling down the cliffside with the best NVGs stolen from--no, _confiscated,_ from the ammo depot-- and to reduce noise he’s timing each shift of his security knot to match the growl of the trucks coming and going at the gates below.  He’s also got the earpiece volume turned way way down, so Jensen’s constant burbling is not going to drift downwind from his headset and betray him.  It does help him track when he’s losing the signal, but anybody triangulating can pin Jensen’s location in about a minute flat.  The deliberate chatter started after the guards panicked, drawing attention.  Pooch could try to stop him, but no, everybody is just letting Jensen run.  That guy’s got a serious case of diarrhea of the verbal centers.

Cougar is surrounded by a great breathing silence and millions of stars.  It’s a pitch-black night, no moon, no breeze.  The rock faces radiate heat from the day.  It’s lousy eroded crumbly rock, so it’s easy as hell to mistake whether he’s done a good enough job for each anchor he sets.  It’s very hard to tell if a cam is set in a good crack, barely set well enough for government work, or if it’s in a damn crumbly hold that will fail if he puts the slightest extra stress on it.  Too good a jerk in falling, and the whole string could unzip under his weight.

He’s trained his whole career to set anchors during the night so that, come daylight, the rope and the cams won’t advertise his climbing pitch to anybody who glances up there.  Here, his compromises around some difficult rotten veins will ensure this effort is not going to stay hidden from a trained ex-KGB agent with decent binoculars, or any climber glancing around up close, especially one who’s already crawled around these rocks checking where all the cave passages go.  As you do, if you’re a bored recon soldier, ex-Soviet Army scout or ex-KGB, trying to improve security on your center of operations.  Or some _other_ hostile guerrilla force who’s damn good at sneaking up behind mercs.

He’s pretty sure there’s at least one of those ex-KGB soldiers in this installation.  He’s found a few very discreet nut and cam scars on the rock, recent indications as clear as flashing signs where the other climber worked their way around a difficult outcrop in a clever way, or dodged across an eroding chimney.  They were aid-climbing upward, not rappelling down as he is, so he’s set his string to keep clear of their possible lines of sight during a revisit.   When Cougar gets behind the cover of a cracked pillar, he checks the scarred rock with his fingers cupped to narrow the beam of his tiniest flashlight.  It’s hard to judge how old the scars are.

The Technician would give him grief about failure to settle in for a longer recon, take his time to set the anchors well out of sight, and properly gauge the way the rock is weathering.  Is this a scratch that was made yesterday, or three months ago, or three years ago?  What kind of equipment were they using, where did they buy it, how does it identify them?

The scratches in the rocks look fresh enough that he might have company out here tonight.  All he knows is that somebody else has been out here climbing around, working some moderately skilled techniques.  Somebody who’s not doing it for fun, not an expert mountaineer; but somebody who’s done fast-moving emergency rescue work, firefighting, SWAT team maybe.  Not the kind of dedicated sniper he really fears, or they’d work harder to hide the scars.  The marks come from gear that’s old-fashioned, probably locally-built custom stuff coming out of blacksmith shops in Kandahar, just like the gear he bought to mask who he is--not the fancy modern cams used by wealthy geology or military outfits from the West.  The locals have to build their own gear; regional rock-climbing groups are very enthusiastic, he’s read some interesting translations of website postings.

He crouches down as tightly as he can, cupping his hands close around the throat-mike, and keeps it subvocalized down in his chest as much as he can.

“Copy that,” Clay’s voice murmurs, and the noise makes Cougar flinch.

Or maybe it’s the red dot of the laser site that pops live onto his sleeve.  Cougar jerks backward, swings out on his rope in a giant spring, and when he comes down onto another jut of ledge ten feet lower, the dot is still sitting there, drilling into the cloth on his upper arm, folded just over his chest.  He doesn’t even have time to push off again when it draws a little arrowhead on his jacket.  It points to his right.  He looks around.  The laser darts onto the rock to his right, draws another arrow.

Quietly, he mutters, “Made me.  Got a bead on me.”

“Copy,” Clay mutters.

Cougar’s hand goes to the security knot, ready to open it up, let go.  Much easier route than getting captured.  Not a lot of old snipers out there.

The bead blinks away.  There’s a soft little _pfffft_ -noise, a high _whang!_ , and a spatter of rock chips stings his left wrist just above the glove.  The earpiece wire dangles from Cougar’s ear, cut through.  Another _pffft_ sound, and the rope securing his pig to his harness is gone.  He doesn’t see it, he feels it.  The weight drops, and the bag of gear bounces away below, making muffled thumps and thuds that remind him nastily of bodies dropping in combat.  He starts to turn his body to shield the security knot from their view, and to start sliding out of his gun sling to fling it off in a different direction.  What’s a hand blown off, when you’re planning your suicide?

Another sharp whang of rock powder stings his wrist in warning.

Right, point made.  That was a sharpshooter knocking off his extra ammo and spare gear, that was _not_ an amateur flailing about.  They’ve got a climber able to rappel into those rocks below, someone who could retrieve his body and his gear every bit as easily as he got here, and learn plenty about him and his team.  Tossup at this point whether he’d defend his team’s intel better that way, or alive and kicking hell out of things as a prisoner.

Then the bead reappears, on the rock at his right, and draws another arrow pointing right.  A nice, clean, steady mark, shadowed slightly on the rock, clearly drawn by someone on a pinnacle above and to his left.  A scuff of his boot throws up enough dust to mark the beam in the clear night air.  The laser on their gun is maybe forty feet away.  They might as well be looking down his shirt collar.  He could try to triangulate them as he moves along, twist the rifle or pull his sidearm under cover of his body and spin to shoot them, but there’s a much better chance of provoking them into taking the shot they decided to hold, for now. 

The arrows might as well be love-notes.  Embarrassing ones.  He’s been _made._  

In their NVGs he probably glows like a tree frog, even in the heat baking off these rocks.  Roque’s swear words are repeating in his head.  But he starts moving right, watching the arrows giving direction, he’s trying to pinpoint the source.  They clearly know the climbing pitch, they’ve been out here ahead of him.  At least the guidance is moving him onto a vein of better rock.  After he makes a fairly rapid traverse into a dip too shallow to call a chimney, the laser dot starts indicating holds and cracks to use his cams to go upward again, climb over a ledge.  It’s giving him suggestions.  Whoever it is, they have the steadiest hands Cougar’s seen in a long time.

They don’t, it seems, want to kill him casually.

Which says nothing about the mercs down below at the trucks, or elsewhere in the compound.  Or what the leadership might do with him.  All he has to do is open that security knot under cover of a normal stretching movement--dead easy.  This isn’t the first time that Cougar’s been looking for a safe place to ditch his gear before he gets himself killed.  But there’s no place to drop his gear where they couldn’t pick it up just as easily as he left it there.  Broken, shattered from a hundred fifty-foot drop to the bottom of the cliff, it’ll still tell tales on his team.

On the off-chance that his throat mike can still transmit, Cougar narrates as he goes.  He’s tired enough suddenly--which is ridiculous, some psychosomatic bullshit about being under somebody else’s control, he _knows_ that--that he’s reduced to some grunts as he pulls himself up over a ledge and flops onto the top surface like a gasping fish.

It’s a fucking balcony.  There’s even some crude carvings left standing near the parent rock, and the shooter is _still_ somewhere above him.  The red dot draws a little circle around something so ordinary that Cougar stares at it. 

Deeper into that balcony he just climbed over, invisible from below-- hell, invisible from the other side where he rappelled past-- is a crack running upward.  There’s a wooden frame in there.  There is a door in that frame, blocking access to the depths.  It has a door handle.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Dun-dun--DUNNNN.
> 
> Well, because I too, when it comes right down to it in stories, clock in at about six years old.


	9. Not In Kansas Any More, Are We?

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sometimes the tough part is to avoid friendly fire. And avoid fragging your own. And sometimes the hardest part is identifying if they are your own people, when all is said and done.

Cougar thinks of some particularly choice curses from Roque.  It’s a cave opening that Jensen didn’t know anything about, possibly for a level of the complex higher up in the rock where he never went.

When Cougar grasps the door handle, it opens, unlocked.  A flashlight comes on squarely in his face.  He doesn’t try to lift his hands to protect his eyes.   The beam shifts away.  

He blinks away flares and looks down into the face of a tiny old woman sitting in a wheelchair, in a rock chamber, holding a small gun sited steadily on his face.  She smiles, gnomelike.

“I’m getting too old for this shit,” Cougar says.

She chuckles, eyes enormous under her glasses, and speaks very softly in English.  “Likewise.  Come in, Sergeant Alvarez.  Secure your rope on the hook there, and close the door.  We’ve spent rather too long waiting for you to get here.  You can call me Hetty.  Perhaps you’d like to sit down there on the bench. Get out of your harness and bag it up, we’ll be going on foot from here.  Then rest a moment, get some water and food from your pack.  Once we get going again we’re likely to be moving fast for quite awhile, getting the civilians out of this prison, with your team’s assistance.”

She doesn’t seem to find it hard to hold the small gun steady on him.  It’s an unfamiliar make and model, which is rather surprising.  He _thinks_ it might be a Romanian brand, and by the look of it one that’s very well-made.  Yet her clothes have an American resort town look.  Her dark hair is bowl-cut, no-nonsense, her accessories plain.  Her accent is not entirely American.  There’s a lot of the Queen’s English about her precision.  Oh yes, he remembers her voice.  He never had an image to go with it, that’s all.

She smiles, pleased at his expression.  Cougar sighs.  He’s never been able to resist the plans of evil little old ladies who remind him of his grandmothers.  His grandmothers somehow, maddeningly, always end up right about things.  It can be infuriating.  Unlike his parents, he’s learned to fold gracefully and get out of the game.  Especially when he doesn’t agree with what they’re up to, and they’re always up to _something._

Cougar slides out of his rifle strap, sets the gun along the crude bench, and sits down beside it, despite the awkward height of the bench.  He takes off his gloves and starts unlatching harness belts.  He glances around the small chamber.  Rock was chipped out in places with some kind of mining ax, very last century, and there’s another crude wooden door, closed, on the far wall of the cave.  “Who are you with?”

She smiles.  “We’re rather informal.  Some folks call us the Office of Special Projects.  I understand your interest in really special projects downstairs.  I happened to be in a convenient location to be called in to help.  We’re not working at cross purposes to your team, Sergeant Alvarez.  We’d rather not see the collective intellectual weight in this mountain get convoyed off to work on this same kind of heavy lifting in physics, but placed somewhere else much harder to reach, and possibly under worse conditions.”

Cougar quirks up a skeptical brow at her.  The guards aren’t planning on taking any prisoners with them.  He hasn’t seen any signs of accommodations for masses of prisoners to get loaded into those trucks.  It’s not something one does on impulse.

“Right,” she said grimly, as if he’d spoken.  “I was afraid of that.”

Cougar takes off his backpack, slides out of his climbing harness, and stows it inside the backpack.  He gets out an MRE, opens a bottle of water.  Offers her the energy bar.

Hetty smiles, and declines it.  She stretches out her free hand, turning her wrist to glance at her watch, and she poises there a moment, as if she’s waiting for him to tackle her.  Absurd.

Cougar tilts his head politely.  “Who are we waiting on?”

She smiles at him.  “Would it pain you to know you were captured by a woman?”

“Not at all.  Not when they have such style as you, Miss Hetty,” Cougar says, drawling it.

Hetty laughs.  “Oh, I heard about the dubious charms of your team when they’ve gone rampaging off-base.  But nobody warned me about the Alvarez smirk.”

“Now you make me sad,” Cougar says.

The door to the interior of the rock opens, and two people step in.  Armed, fingers just outside the trigger guards of sidearms that match Hetty’s.  A man first, who should be looking as blank and stoic and ex-KGB as anybody the Losers have seen outside, because he’s wearing stolen merc gear and the sidearm is turning wherever he looks.  But he just isn’t.  His body language is all slouch, not merc style.  He’s sporting what the ex-KGB mercs would call a beach tan--what anybody from Arizona or Texas would call normal office worker coloring.  His hair looks shaggy, the clothes are rumpled.  The guy’s closer to a surfbum than a goon, his most natural outfit is probably a loud shirt and board shorts and flipflops.  He’s talking to the woman behind him, too, cracking some joke in a flat Los Angeles smogbelt accent, and smiling happily at Cougar as if he’s pleased with the world.

“Dude!  You got here!  Nice speed on that nasty little pitch under the balcony, too.  Fingers of _steel,_ man!”

There’s his friend, too, three steps behind him.  The dark-haired woman is wearing gear that any Soviet snipergal would be proud to have, the long gun in a tailored case along her back, every piece settled on her tall, slim, _fabulous_ body like she knows exactly how to use all of them.  Like she grew up using Soviet guns.  This is the hand that drew him directions on the rock, and holds that sidearm steady now.  She doesn’t look friendly at all.

Cougar smiles slowly.  “Miss Hetty, I am honored.”

“You should be,” Hetty says.

The guy pulls a set of plastic handcuffs out of a pocket, starts forward.

“Don’t be an asshole,” the younger woman snaps at him.

“Those are...” Cougar pauses, puzzled, hands up, palms open in warning. “You do not want to flash your handy American riot cuffs here.”

“Yeah?  Why not?”

The younger woman’s sidearm comes up a little, warningly.

“Facility command might be American.   Mercs might know what they’re seeing.”  Cougar hopes that the throat-mike is still working, passing along what he can.

“Interesting.  I’ve only heard Turkish and Russian and Serbian downstairs,” the man says.

 _“Max,”_ Hetty says, grimly satisfied, as if it’s some kind of proof. 

If she missed the tiny flinch in his face, he’d be very surprised.

He stares up at her.  Then he sees her wince too.  Hetty shifts in her chair, grimacing, and it looks like she’s in pain from some injury.  He can’t imagine what it must take to make an oldtimer like her show pain.

The other two split their focus, the man watching her with concern, the younger woman staring coldly at Cougar, finger on the outside of the trigger guard. 

Cougar gazes back at the younger woman.  He stays relaxed, totally open posture, acknowledging that she’s in charge and he knows the stare is annoying her and he’s still going to soak in everything he sees about her.  He’s memorizing her with total focus, her hairline and the shape of her ears and the quirk of her eyebrows.  Dark, angular, graceful, and very deadly.  Twitchy as she is, it might as well be the first time she’s ever had a sniper really _look_ at her properly.  She still reminds him of Russian women sharpshooters, and it’s a memory that makes him smile in pleasure.

“Knock it off,” the man says to Cougar, easy, relaxed, not taking it personally.  Yet.

He turns his gaze to the man, who is grinning at him now.  The surfbum may chuckle, but under that is something tougher.  The man has blue eyes, not Jensen’s cornfield sky blue, but a colder reef-gray, the color of dog sharks.  Cougar gazes at him in fascination.  So many intriguing signs of recent stress, tension, outright grief.  When the man glances aside at Hetty, he knows that they almost lost Hetty to some danger.  Just that one concerned look is enough to make him like the guy instantly.

The speed of the guy’s reactions does not match the rumpled look, either.  The snap of his gaze, looking around at noises back in the corridor, says he’d draw down on Cougar as fast as his partner will.  _This_ is the kind of surfbum who leaves the club or the bar early with pager calls because he turns out to be somebody on active duty, or sworn personnel, or somebody in emergency services. 

There’s something else odd, too.  The guy doesn’t settle into any one pinball pocket, in Cougar’s mental guesses about his private life.  The guy could be flouncing through some drag revue for a charity fundraiser, or he could be the star of a very macho firehouse pinup calendar--either one seems perfectly possible, which is in odd sensation.  Which one it will turn out to be doesn’t matter to Cougar.  He’d go down on his knees in front of that zipper whatever he was doing, if he ran into the guy at a dance club or a bar.

It’s a sharp surprising reaction, falling into that _, here,_ so far away from the stimulus of a leather crowd and loud music and the smell of poppers and latex.  And it’d be a helluva sandwich, if he got to play Lucky Pierre with both of them.  They’re clearly long-term, moving smoothly with each other.  How often does he run into somebody who can capture _him_ on a climbing pitch?  Those _legs--_

Cougar blinks.  Between the two of them, he’s so turned on it’s ridiculous.  As Pooch would say, _Not now, not the time._

He doesn’t dare look away at Hetty.  He’s sure Hetty can read it all as plainly as if it was a stock market ticker running on his forehead, never mind anything visible below his chin.  His grandmothers certainly could, every time.  Which taught him something about bluffing in poker, but he’ll never be as good as they were.

Hetty engages the safety on her gun.  “I’d like to hear more about what Max is up to.”

Cougar takes another slow sip of water, caps the bottle, finishes spooning out the last of the salty MRE stew, bags up the trash and stows it.  He thinks about what he can say to her, what she already knows.  She knows his name, that he’s not alone, she knows his team is operating in the area.  How did she know that?

Technically, Max was giving Clay his orders.  Whether betraying Max’s interests to some unknown outside force is treason, or not, depends on whether Max is keeping this on the downlow as a profitable but extralegal side-project, or if he’s invoked direct national interest already.  Cougar is wondering if it’s all gone too far for Max to hide it.  Hiding things--after losing that diskie ship, that’s what the trucks must be doing.

“What are they putting in the trucks?” Cougar says.

Hetty sighs.  “Boxes of papers.  Records.”

Cougar gives her a sharp glance.  That’s what failing regimes do when they pull out of a place.  “Then we need to get the people out now.”

The man drawls lazily, “Yeah, this bunch, they aren’t gonna open the cells before they blow the place up.  Hey, how much are chess-playing mathematicians in Russia, a dime a dozen?”

“And we ought to question the guards,” Hetty agrees.

Cougar shrugs.  “Didn’t come for them.”

“You’re an awfully cool customer,” the man says.

“And you’re a cop,” Cougar says, surprising himself with the knowledge.  Possibly an undercover cop, clever, not a beat flatfoot, not inclined to break fingers first thing to get answers.  Not like the thugs driving the trucks below.  He unwraps the energy bar, bites into it.  Opens the water bottle, sips.  There’s very little more he can do to show he’s got no intention of attacking them.

He gestures with the water bottle at the younger woman.  That stride width and the ferocious awareness could be Soviet, or Finnish, or French, or upper class Brit, but he knows they’re not.  “West Coast cop.”

The man looks annoyed, and the younger woman gives him an apologetic glance, like she _knows_ she gave it away, but she’s still not sure how.

Hetty smiles.  “Tell Clay hello for me.”

Cougar takes another sip.  “You can talk to him yourself out the door--” and he gives them the frequency he was using before the laser dot found him.

Hetty smiles, and waves her free hand toward the door where he climbed in.  The younger woman steps wide around Cougar as she crosses the chamber.  The man pulls a tangle of wires from his backpack, adjusts his comm gear, and hands a second earpiece and mike to Hetty.  She shifts the gun to her off hand.  It doesn’t look like off-handed shooting would slow her down much.

Hetty speaks into the mike in a Slavic language.  Not Russian.  Romanian, perhaps, if her gun is any clue.  Then she chuckles, and issues a lot of very rude Russian _mat,_ which is startling to hear from such a dignified older woman.  Something about Cougar sexing up her poor agents right in front of her.

Cougar pretends he doesn’t know _mat._  He’s not sure he’s as convincing as he ought to be if he’s trying to play these games with an old hand like Hetty.  No way is she as retired from the Great Game as she appears.  The man is giving her another worried glance, too.  Hetty gives a sign gesture to the guy.  He disentangles another comm set and hands it over, at full arm’s length, to Cougar.  He gets a brief code murmur on the old frequency, tunes into the new one, repeats it for Hetty.

“Well, here's another nice mess you've gotten me into!" Clay says in his ear.

“We want to stop the men who are taking all the records from shooting all the people too.”

“Tell me that again,” Clay replies.

Cougar repeats it in a jumble.  Just carelessly leave out a word, here or there, and the crazy talk can indicate pretty well any given situation.

“Why yes, that’s a very good idea, why didn’t you _say_ so the first time?”

Hetty smiles, clearly recognizing the whole Laurel and Hardy-style routine.  If everybody else on that frequency finds it amusing, they’re not making any noise into their mikes to announce themselves.  That’s a nice change.  He wonders how Clay organized that one... until he hears a voice humming. 

It emerges into words to the Bob Marley song, _No More Troubles._ He glances up, and sees Hetty is amused.  She glances over at her agents, who look horrified, and she outright smiles.

_“...Make love and not war! 'Cause we don't need no trouble._

_What we need is love (love)_

_To guide and protect us on. (on)_

_If you hope good down from above, (love)_

_Help the weak if you are strong now. (love)_

_We don't need no trouble;_

_What we need is love. Oh, no!_

_We don't need - we don't need - no more trouble!_

_Lord knows, we don't need no trouble!...”_

There’s a scumble of noise and the singer’s voice cuts out.

Hetty says, “I’m glad to hear that Corporal Jensen made it out of here.  He’s quite... distinctive on a comm channel, isn’t he?”

“Why don’t you push the lady’s wheelchair, and let the nice agents do their jobs?” Clay says in his earpiece.

“If they like,” Cougar says, glancing up with a skeptical eyebrow.

“And stop it.”

“What?”

“The staring, isn’t it?  It’s the staring.”

“But they’re very pretty,” Cougar says.

“They don’t even _make the grade_ for pretty where they come from, trust me,” Clay says.

“Then we should go look at those people instead,” Cougar says blandly.

Hetty chuckles, agreeing.  “You’d be welcome, you know.”

Clay chuckles too.  “Yeah, but last time?  I got beaned with the tiller of a helium airship and I had to promise Hizzonner the Mayor I’d never darken his town’s sidewalks again.  In triplicate.”

Hetty leans her face into one hand, chuckling.  “Well, yes, you do seem to have a bizarre talent for adventures.  I’m sure the Goodyear people have forgiven you by now.  Your team did do the job, even if it was in your own eccentric manner.”

The younger woman is looking at the guy, puzzled, silently mouthing the phrases.  _“Airship?  You meant the football blimp?”_

The guy rolls his eyes.  _“The Losers,”_ he mouths back, clearly disgusted.  Then he waves it off.  _“Later.”_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> After I asked my beta reader cougars_catnip for suggestions about additional help for our guys, she thought of some of the NCIS: LA agents with a background in Romania. Not having watched the show, I began checking on it. Turns out I’m a total sucker for many of the characters, but Linda Hunt’s character Hetty Lange is irresistible. Timewise, the whole Romanian side-trip they take could well be extended southward in an unofficial way.  
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NCIS:_Los_Angeles
> 
> Just as an FYI, using Laurel and Hardy routines is probably not as secure a communications recognition method as some might prefer in a professional operation, since they are well-known and fairly easily memorized. Also, if you like your humor slapstick, still funny.  
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurel_and_Hardy
> 
> Hetty Lange got shot in Romania. G. Callen and Kensi found her there. I figured she probably got taken to a VA hospital somewhere in Germany for surgery. What you want to bet that it wasn't the surgery that kept her out of work, recovering for that long, and out of the loop at the Office of Special Projects? What you want to bet that she needed time to recover from all kinds of other business conducted during that gap in time? Heh heh heh.  
> Poker, anybody?


	10. Caving

“So when did your CO try to take down a Goodyear blimp?” says the woman.  Kensi, the man called her once.  She pauses, runs the beam of her flashlight along the pathway, scanning the ground out to twenty feet ahead of them.  They’re walking along a steep natural corridor, no railings, no built-up bits to smooth the rough parts of the footing.  The stalagmites look small, stunted, compared to some of the caves Cougar has climbed in, but this has been dry country for a long time, and it takes water to shift around limestone like that.

“Got it,” Cougar says, and she moves on, a swirl of warmer air in the cave chill.

“Were you even around for that?” Kensi asks.

Cougar smiles.  She won’t see it anyway.  He’d been perched outside, up on the ship’s mooring mast.  “Always pack ropes and cams.”

“Yeah.  Flashlights, too, huh?”

He flicks on the tiny climbing light he uses, points out a snag ahead.  They’ll have to get around it carefully, without falling off into the pits below.  And there’s a gap.

She says, “Take those old doors off the hinges for a bridge there?”

“Too short.”

She sighs.  “Yeah, I figured that was going to be a tough bit.  Once we get something tied up, then we could lift Hetty, carry her around that, fold up her chair and sling it between us to get it past the gap.”  

She’s already explained they can’t go back the same way they came, or the way they originally found the little chamber where Hetty is waiting to be wheeled out.  She did not explain what kept Hetty from hiking with them.  None of them explained what the blonde man would be doing instead of working with them in this alternate passageway Kensi had found.  Cougar hasn’t asked, either.

Cougar points with a finger, and she slides aside out of his way.  He crouches, reading sign.  Rope marks show in the dust, scars pit several of the pillars on this side, and some broken pillars on the far side.  He hasn’t been the first to try this.  By the look of skid marks along the edge, some have failed, too.  He steps up next to the edge, flicks around the climbing light, considering the depth below and the marks already scraped into a pillar across the gap.  “Lasso didn’t work?”

“How good are you at it?” she says.  If she’s annoyed, it doesn’t come through her totally level tone.

He shrugs.  Good enough to lasso bawling piglets and calves when he was seven and his legs barely reached the middle of the horse doesn’t count in here.  He knows he’s not good enough to lasso that one sturdy pinnacle in a forest of down-reaching fragile teeth that halfway block it.  He has a slingshot in his backpack, but he hasn’t been able to make it act reliably like a bolo with a heavy climbing rope.  This is when he could use his crossbow, which went down the rocks when Kensi shot away his bag of extra tricks.  Hell, he could really use some of Barton’s trick arrows.  He considers pulling out a plank from the doors, using it like the pole of a highjumper, but it can’t be done.  Not here.  Of course not.  The ceiling dips dangerously low just before the gap.

“Just when you really need a pogo stick,” she says.

That makes him chuckle, which seems to surprise her.  Under her flashlight beam, he points up at the low overhead, shaking his head.  “If it was closer, I could have you rope my feet and brace me, but it is too far to just fall across it, stretch, and grab.  Easier to jump it cold.”

“What, you were a track star too?”

He shakes his head.  “Parkour.  I got chased home from school.”

“And you just didn’t shoot them?”

“Oh, I did.  Slingshot.  Until I broke a guy’s jaw, and I was not sorry.”  He considers the landing area.  “The recruiter was surprised.”

“And you’re still not sorry?”

Her light has come round to him.  He shrugs.  “Sometimes.  I don’t take those shots any more.”

She blinks.  “You have that discretion?”

One side of his mouth curls up in a smile.  “I take it, with missions like this.  And I still keep a slingshot.”

She cracks a soft laugh, but it still echoes.  “What, didn’t you start shooting guns when you were six or something?”

“Nine,” he says, looking around at her.  “And you?”

“Eleven,” she says.

“You have certainly caught up,” he says dryly.

She has a nice chuckle, too.  Then she sobers, turns away.  Her flashlight points out problems.  “There’s not much room over there to slow down.”

“Sí, es verdad,” he agrees.  He slides his arms out of his rifle sling and backpack, takes out his climbing harness, steps into it, and secures it to two short ropes, handing her the other end of the coils.  He leaves his pack and his gun near her feet, and walks away.  It feels odd not to have his earpiece in place, but down in this rock no radio signals get through.  He asks, “Can you guide the light?”

“Sure, but-- Alvarez?  Really, you’re going to jump that--”

He doesn’t turn.  “My friends call me Cougar.”

“Right,” she says, and directs the light to splash across a wider part of his path.

“Test run first,” he says.  He paces out his track in slow motion first, letting the ropes trail after him, testing how they uncoil, and whether they catch on anything.  If he doesn’t make the jump and fails, she’ll at least be able to secure the ropes and get help to pull him up again, whatever shape he’s in.

“The lines didn’t snag, no loops,” she says quietly.

“Good,” he says.  Next, he tries it at a trot, with her light leading his boot toes by four feet.  He tries to use the stride-length he always uses when he’s running for speed.  

But he doesn’t stop as she expects.  He pulls up short just three steps from the lip, twists away, pushes off a thick stub of stalagmite with one arm, keeps going at a different angle, and finally stops when he grasps a column of rock, hangs there a moment.  Then he pushes himself away from the edge, sidles backward.

If he feels it going wrong before final step-off, he can abort that way, good to know.

She lets out a sharp huff of air, definitely annoyed.

He looks up under the hatbrim.  “Impulse.”

“Like hell,” she growls.

“Dude, she can make you sorry you were ever born,” says the other cop’s voice lazily, rising from further back in the cave chamber.

Cougar turns.  “Nothing less would do,” he says, looking up at Kensi, with just a tiny smirk.

“Dude, now you’re really in for it,” the man says, a black shape behind his flashlight.  “You  gonna try that jump?”

“Can you make it?” Cougar asks, turning serious.

“Naw, I know what I can do on urban freerunning.  That is not in my range.  Came up to say we had to move.  Hetty’s in the second chamber back, she’s taking a breather.  We got some silly guards banging around downstairs, looking for something.  Maybe your bunch did something fun?”

“Nothing planned ahead of time,” Cougar says.

“Do all you guys have lousy impulse control?”

Cougar grunts, looks at the gap again.  “Compared to what?  To Hetty?  Yes.”

They both laugh.

“Targets of opportunity,” Cougar reminds them.

“Otherwise known as gambling, right,” the man teases, knowing that a military sniper is someone who will easily spend an entire day slowly, painfully crawling up into a position.  The question about fire ant nests is going to come up any time now, he knows it.

Cougar snorts.  “Only on a sure thing.”

The man says to his partner, “What are you betting he makes it?”

She grunts.  “Do we have a choice?  He’s betting his fool neck.”

“All the little children got choices,” the man says.

“I bet you a dance in a decent club.  One dance, Señorita.  A tango.”  Cougar grins.

She just blinks at him.  The whites of her eyes flare pale in the reflected light from her flashlight.

Cougar turns to the man.  “Señor, your bet is, you must teach her how to dance it.”

The man chuckles.  “Now that’s a helluva thing to ask!”

“When I’m betting my neck?  And Hetty’s, as she needs to see a doctor soon?”

“Oh, you’re on, Cougar,” Kensi growls.  She thumps her partner, who grunts. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There was an NCIS: LA and Hawaii Five-Oh crossover where Kensi Blye's character would guest on Hawaii Five-Oh, and later Daniel Dae Kim and Scott Caan went the other way to guest on NCIS:LA.  
> I wasn't even aware of any of this when I ran across an intriguing link about rock climbing. I came across the idea of caving and rock climbing from a story or a comment on one in Hawaii Five-Oh fandom. That link went to a blog post about Daniel Dae Kim trying out the walls at their rock climbing club in Hawaii. I had no idea he was a climber. Poking around elsewhere on this club's website, they had lots of information and some fabulous trip pictures about club members and owners working out new pitches in Hawaiian caves. Those are often collapsed lava tubes, sometimes crumbly, and fallen debris on the floors can be sharp. The cavers use big mats placed under the climbers as they work out new pitches, because they fall a lot. Do not do this alone! Not a climber myself, but I have friends and family who were interested in it, and any decent writer of action stories can find the basics useful to know.


	11. Why You Don't Bet With Cougar

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Nothing up his sleeve, nothing to see here...

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Inspired by some of the fandom's excellent stories about Jensen, Cougar, and tango. Also, by some excellent vids on YouTube of neoswing dancers and couples doing tango in crowds in the street. Including, in one case, a really fabulous gay couple who were superb dancers.

“Excellent,” Cougar says, offering his gloved hand to each of them in turn.  “Now, we will do this.  If you'll manage the lights, Señorita, and you the ropes, Señor--”  Cougar pauses, studies the far side with his climbing light, planning where each foot will come down over there, until his body will come up against the cave wall where the path turns under a low opening. 

Cougar goes back to the full extent of his run, stretches thoroughly, crouches, breathes deep breaths of limey dusty air, exhales, starts counting.  “Three, two, one--”

Kensi does a beautiful job of lighting his way, and the man gets his beam of light steady on the far side.

Fourteen, fifteen, sixteen strides-- _oof!_  as he pushes off with his entire body.

He feels the strain in his toes, his knees, his back. 

The thump when his boot comes down again echoes with a bang in the chamber, and again when his second boot comes down.  Then he’s running in loose dust, aimed straight at the arch’s low opening into the next chamber.  He thumps into the wall with both forearms, glances off sidewise, stumbles three steps along stalagmites, falls at the thick one he was counting on stopping his momentum, grabs on, sways a moment.  The ropes are trailing away behind him, sagging across the dark gap.  When he turns, taking deep breaths, he sees Kensi grinning.

“You jump like a _flea,”_ she says.

He grins back at them.  “You owe me a dance.”

“The name is Kensi, you cheating cheater.”

Cougar bows.  “It’s a pleasure, Señorita Kensi.”

She turns, and pokes the man standing next to her.

“Deeks, man, that’s me,” the man says.

“Señor Deeks, tango can be good exercise, too.”  He bends like a dancer, stretches out his hamstrings from the effort.

The cop starts to laugh. 

 _“That’s_ hardcore,” Kensi tells him, pointing at the gap.

Deeks holds up his open hands.  “Okay, okay, I believe you.  Yeah.  Actually, that’s just... freaky.”

Cougar secures one rope on a set of stalagmites as his harness safety, and detaches the other, moving around to sort out different stalagmites to net together as a base for the first bridge rope.

Kensi secures the other end of the bridge rope at their side of the gap, with a rachet knot to tighten it up.  She takes another rope from Deeks’s backpack, makes a loop, swings it, and tosses the lasso at Cougar so accurately that he snatches it easily out of the air.  He starts working on netting it around a third set of stubby stalagmites.

Deeks pulls out a third rope, makes a lasso, tosses it across a little less tidily, but Cougar strains out and snags that one too.  Cougar recognizes it as one of his own ropes, the very first string he was pinning along the rocks to find his way down.  Deeks grins and holds up a handful of cams, the few he was able to reach--also taken from the very top of Cougar’s pitch.  The rest are abandoned in the rock until another climber takes them out.  Clay won’t fuss about the requisitions for replacing those, because Roque does all those boring chores--aka yelling--for him.

Cougar checks for places to anchor the third rope.  This one has to brace the upper body, giving the amateur rope-walkers something to hang onto with their hands.  He has to duck through the low arch into the next chamber to find anything sturdy enough to secure it.  The limestone arch sawing at the handrope and reducing its height makes the rope less useful as a climbing aid, but better than nothing.  He hears them talking while he works in the next chamber.

“Don’t tie it like that,” Kensi says to her partner.  “We need a quick release knot with a long tail that we can pull out once we’re all across.”

“But what if we want to leave it here?  What if we need to come back this way?”

“What if those idiots come up in here looking for us?” she counters.  “We have to sweep out our prints before the last crossing, too.”

He snorts.  “Okay, don’t tell me, let me guess--we need the ropes in another spot later on.”

“You’re just lucky I had a chance to go hunting around these passages from the other side first, so we can get Hetty down to the hangar bay.”

“I was kind of counting on that,” Deeks says.

Cougar finishes a ratchetting knot on the hand-rope.  He tightens it until they call back to him that tension will do.  Then he goes back to the edge, catches the three rope ends that Kensi throws, loops them aside out of the way on lesser stalagmites. 

“So what’s the plan for getting those folks out of the cells?”  Deeks demands.

“Two of my unit are extracting,” Cougar says.

“That’s _it?_  You know how many guards they have running around in here?”

“We’re efficient,” Cougar says.

“That’s why our flea here likes guns so much,” Kensi points out dryly.

“What, only twenty to one, dude?  Wow, you guys must be slipping.  This _is_ the Losers we’re talking about, right?”

Cougar shrugs.  “We’re all getting older.”

“And hey, no explosions--”  Deeks pauses, mouth open, while something rumbles in the cliffhead below them.  Dust sifts down from different places in the roof of the chamber, and Cougar is busy watching those, mapping where the faults and cracks might be.  Then there’s a high-pitched shrill vibration that drills the air for ten seconds, silenced by a long, deeper _boom._

“Right.  You were going to say?” Kensi says, folding her arms.  She’s smudged by the pale limey dust, making it obvious where she’s been and what she’s been doing.

So is Deeks.  He aims his flashlight around the chamber in quick darting movements.  Then he pins Cougar in the glare.

Cougar holds his dusty gloves wide, shrugging.  “So it takes us a little longer now.”

Deeks starts to laugh.  “What the hell _was_ that?”

“A turbine?  Maybe the power plant.”

“Oh great, so they’re all bumping around in the dark just like we are.”

“It is a great leveler.”  Cougar retests the tension of all three ropes, steps onto one of the two foot ropes, tests how much it sags under his weight.  Having the hand-rope at one side makes it more like tightrope walking, and he walks across with the aid of their lights, using a light touch to the hand-rope, mostly balancing freely.  He steps up on the dusty loose edge when Deeks offers a hand.  They grab each other’s wrists in a climber’s grip briefly, leaving dusty marks on each other’s gloves.

“You always walk tightropes with your boots on?” Kensi says, critically.

“Or running.  Sometimes we’re in a hurry.”

There’s another rumble through the rock.

“Old friends, these boots.”  He watches the ceiling, waiting for another blast.  Eventually it comes.  He almost smiles.  Roque must be having fun down there.  “Do you have more ropes for slinging Hetty’s wheelchair?”

“No, but we could cut a short loop from the end of your safety line there, loop it through the top of the chair and up onto the hand-rope, ride the folded-up frame along on the foot ropes,” Kensi says. 

“But how are we getting Hetty over?” Deeks asks.

“Not enough rope for a boat-sling to draw her across, if we need the hand-brace,” Cougar says.  He looks at Kensi, at Deeks.  He knows his ropes will support the weight of three people--one of them, himself, and Hetty--at the same time.  But he’s unsure of their skill level for this; it will be like balancing with a partner on a tightrope.  The two of them would work better as a pair, but Deeks is clearly not as good a climber as Kensi.  If it’s just one person lifting Hetty, Cougar is the strongest and the best on the ropes.  “If you can wrap Miss Hetty on my back, while I’m wearing my harness, then I can carry her across.  She’s small.”

They look at him silently.

“Miners carried much bigger loads on ropes at the Serra Pelada gold mine in Brazil.  There was a movie, sí?  The hole they left is a lake now.  But things are still like that in other places.”

Deeks says, _“Powaqqatsi_.  That’s the movie.”

Cougar quirks a smile.  He figured Deeks would know his movie history.  The guy _has_ to know the movie industry to be an undercover cop in Tinseltown.

“They use industrial shovels these days.  Bigger than this whole cave.  Still leave honkin’ big holes,” Deeks says harshly.  Apparently he knows his resource extraction industries too.

“You’ve seen the coal seams in the ranges around here, haven’t you?” Kensi says.

He snorts. 

She says, “All the junk those mining companies leave behind.  Lots of gear, trucks, aircraft.”

“Explosives, of course,” Deeks says.

“For the underground surveys,” Cougar agrees.  If Deeks and Kensi are worried about the kind of imperial power that can be brought to bear out here, like a diamond-tipped drill bit out of nowhere, then it just shows they have uncommon good sense.  Somebody will get blamed for this place falling apart--and this whole diskie-ship project couldn’t have been all that stable to begin with.  Somebody is going to be mightily pissed off at what’s happening here.  Sticking their fingers in the spokes of somebody’s pet project is nothing new for the Losers.

Hetty already knows that, too.  The airship debacle was a little too public, creating one of those domestic jurisdiction questions--too much unwelcome attention.  Just another reason why the Losers will never get to spend all that much time in their little House of Nightmares, stateside.

Kensi makes a rude noise, sighs, and wipes the back of her wrist across her face, leaving streaks of dust.  “Let’s get Hetty past this. We’ve still got another gap to bridge.  It isn’t as bad as this one, there’s more things to anchor onto.”

“I hope she is able to rest a little,” Cougar says.

“Oh, she will.  She’s a survivor.  So, hey, you want to keep an eye on things here, rest a bit, and we’ll go back and get her up to this point?” Deeks says.

“If you won’t need an extra set of hands, that would be wise,” Cougar says.  He rummages in his backpack, near Kensi’s boot prints, and offers them an extra water bottle.

“We’re good, thanks,” Deeks says.

Cougar drinks from it, then looks around with his climbing light, moves the backpack out of easy view, puts a mag in his sidearm.  He sits down with his back leaning into a stump of a stalagmite, sidearm on his knee, and watches them walk away, light bobbing, voices fading as they go.  Then he closes his eyes on the dark and listens to the cave, to the softest air movement soughing past him from the gap they just bridged.  It’s a bit of air motion that wasn’t there before the explosions.  He wonders what new holes got punched open among the manmade corridors and the caverns, and how that’s going to affect traffic patterns for the evacuation of former prisoners.  Recall of Jensen’s maps suggests that Roque must have got down into the utility area near the kitchens, so probably Jensen got it right, guessing about the location of the generators.  Maybe Roque got to make his selection of butcher knives and trolley carts after all.  Cougar smiles.


	12. So Many Questions

Cougar picks the cavern-side lock with a wire, eases open the door.  They’re looking into a dark pantry, lit outside the far end.  Canned goods are scattered on the floor, sacks and canisters have been tossed around as if somebody was searching for something.

The other end of the long, dark pantry is a door hanging wide open on a chaotic scene.  The lights out there flicker, as if the generator isn’t quite strong enough to carry the load, but the kitchen beyond is full of people.

Guys in merc black are outnumbered in a corner, shouting, threatening to shoot people.  But they’re just waving fists.  And it’s not the leaders making noise, just the outliers at the edges, and only after prodding by mutters from the rest.  They don’t seem to have any guns, at first glance.

The other people are pretty much ignoring them, streaming past on their way somewhere else.  Civilians in dirty clothes walk past.  They look hard-used and tired, some of them elderly, many with canes or walkers.  Nearly all of them are limping.  There’s raw bleeding spots, swollen skin, black scabs, on their ankles.

Not all of them are able to walk, either.  There’s two incongruous grocery store shopping carts, labeled in Farsi with a chainstore from five hundred miles away, holding three people seated on the basket walls, being pushed along, by two other ex-prisoners for each cart.  A wheeled kitchen trolley goes squealing past, holding two people, pushed by a big bear of a guy wearing cracked glasses.  Then another trolley, carrying three people, being pushed by another two people who are leaning hard into the cart’s support.

They can’t be bothered to react to the guards shouting in their faces.  They’ve got better things to do.  All of those pushers and riders are arguing in Russian about Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, and in something like Turkish, they’re arguing about an Alcubierre Drive.  It’s a name that always jumps at him like the twinge of nerves in an old burn.  Alcubierre is a living Spanish physicist, a role-model used by the grandmothers for a very bright kid who could have ripped through college in very short order, but ended up in the Army instead, using his skills to kill people.  Cougar’s attempts at classrooms since then haven’t been happy ones. 

The carts are followed by a big black soldier with a scarred eyelid and brow.  Roque is shouting in some kind of Slavic pidgin,  telling people which way to go.  When one of the mercs lifts a pistol from his jacket, Roque casually swings his machinegun out sideways, and shoots the merc in the knee with a semi-auto burst of just three single shots.  _Bang.  Bang.  Bang._

“Stay there, or I’ll clean the room,” Roque snaps at them in English.  The merc’s machine pistol is still spinning on the floor.  Roque repeats it in pidgin and in Ukrainian, shouting past the man’s screaming.  He points with his free hand.  “You, kick that gun over here.”

“You know, that’s just not something you see every day,” Deeks whispers.

Hetty starts to chuckle silently, her body shaking the wheelchair.  Cougar is not sure what she finds amusing, and not sure he wants to know.  That’s because he’s met too many of the Company’s oldtimers on his wet ops.  They get an increasingly weird sense of humor.

Cougar holds up a flat palm, warning them to stay there, and steps out of the doorway.  Standing amongst the cans, he puckers his lips and whistles a three-note melody.

Roque doesn’t even turn, just growls, “Took you long enough.  Get the gun, wouldja?”

Cougar steps past him, scoops it up.  “Any others?”

Roque points at another merc, makes a beckoning gesture with his fingers.  The merc gets glared at by his own team.  Slowly, he starts to pull out a machine pistol from a kidney holster, and then he’s a blur of motion, twisting around.

Cougar’s shot him, center-mass, with the strange gun, before Roque bothers to move.

The mercs all stare down at the body, and then at Cougar.

Cougar lifts a skeptical eyebrow at them.  It’s not like it was a difficult shot.  Then Cougar points the strange gun in both fists down at Roque’s victim, who’s still screaming on the floor, clutching his leg.  And he waits, just looking at them.

At last, he lifts one hand from the gun, points at a third merc, and makes that same beckoning gesture that Roque did.  Shit, with _three_ of them hiding guns like that, they should have taken down Roque before he even knew they were armed.  But they just stood there flat-footed, waiting, as if nobody ever gave them the order.

Well, Roque is grinning straight at the guy they all expect to give that order.  And the guy is not giving it now.  It’s not like Roque would miss.

Very slowly, Cougar points at the floor, then at the guy with the gun.  The guard pulls his machine pistol from a similar kidney holster and lays it on the floor.  The others glare at him, too.  Cougar points at another merc at the front, who puts a boot out and gingerly shoves the confiscated gun across the kitchen floor.

Cougar walks out, picks up both confiscated guns, and puts them on a counter near Roque without looking away from the mercs.  Then he tugs on his shirt tail, points at the two mercs nearest to the screaming man on the floor, waves at a nearby sink, waves at the man’s legs.  They don’t look happy to have permission to give the guy some help.

“Thanks,” Roque says, picking up one of the confiscated guns and snorting in disgust.  But he shoves it in a side pocket of his pants.  In Ukrainian, he asks something, and repeats in English, “Any questions?”

Nobody says anything.  Some of the guys in front shuffle backward a little tighter into the crowd.  Dios mio, it’s outright embarrassing.

“What frequency?”  Cougar tucks in the earpiece that Deeks gave him.

Roque tells him.

 There’s Jensen, humming in his ear.  Cougar’s brows fly upward.  _“Shaft?”_

Roque grunts.  “Thinks it’s funny.  Fuckin’ alien.  I’ll give him some blaxploitation action, beat the stupid right outta that punk, I’m tellin’ you.”

“Ooooh Shaaaaft--” Jensen croons in falsetto.  “It’s a tribute, guys, to our awesome explosives expert--hopefully he’ll wait till I get all my data mining out before he blows this mountain up--”

“Jay, just shut up,” Pooch’s voice says.  He’s drowned out for a second by the shrieks in the kitchen when the mercs are tying shirt rags onto their injured guy.  Pooch snarls, “What the hell-- what is _that racket?”_

Roque grunts.  “Merc I shot for stupidity is whining about it.  We’re fine.”

“Got you some help translating,” Cougar says, past the higher screams of the guy getting his knee washed and bound up.

“Where?” Roque says, looking into the dark pantry.

Cougar beckons Hetty to be brought out, and he pulls his own sidearm, so both hands have guns while he’s watching the mercs.

Roque reports, “Cougar brought friends, gonna bring ‘em down shortly to help out.”

“Copy that, we could use the help,” Pooch says.

It takes Kensi and Deeks a few minutes to clear a way for the wheelchair through the pantry mess, and then they’re wheeling her out into view.  Somehow it ends up looking like it’s the Queen arriving.  Hetty looks up and smiles at Roque, looking mischievous.

“Well, hell, so that’s where that back door was, I knew it was in there somewhere,” Roque says.

Hetty sits back in the chair, smiling up at Roque.  “Indeed, it has been awhile, hasn’t it?”

Roque smiles back at her, pleased.  “Good to see you made it through.”

“Thank you. So, what would you like me to tell that squad of bullies?”

“Tell ‘em Command is gonna wanna talk to them, and not in a nice way, so if they got anything _useful_ to say, they could earn some credit for later on.  _Now_ would be a good time to pass it along.”

“We should process them separately if we’re serious about getting information from them,” Hetty says.

Roque grins at her.  “You know that, and I know that, but they don’t know that.”

“Why do you want to make them squirm?”

Roque nods toward the injured people trudging past.  “Just look at ‘em.  Those mercs were running the cells.”

“I would rather dig out the command personnel who failed to give these people adequate resources,” Hetty said.

Roque looks at her fondly.  “Knew there was a reason I liked you.  Tell you what--you work out a way to ask ‘em separately, without pulling off too many of our other folks from stuff they gotta do, and Cougar here will back you up on that job.”

Hetty nods.

Roque taps his earpiece. “We talked to your guy Callen an hour ago, when he was knocking out their truck drivers.”

“He gets all the fun,” Hetty says.

“Are you up for a chopper ride?  Callen wants you to take it easy--”

“I am, but I’d also be happy to stay down here awhile and help talk to folks, if you need that,” Hetty says, interrupting him.

“Yeah, we could use the help.  Able-bodied ride in trucks, so we got to sort out who can drive those crazy roads.  For now, the injured get parked down by the road out front.”

“That sounds doable.  We’ll need to give the drivers directions, then.”

Roque is looking at her thoughtfully.  He fingers his earpiece.  “Pooch, I got a wheelchair down here, with somebody to translate for us.  We could put her with Jensen, have the two of them work together.  If Jensen can push himself in her wheelchair, with a food trolley tied to his handles, then she could sit on the trolley and hold his laptop for him.”

There’s a squawk of outrage from the earpiece that makes Cougar almost smile.  But he still doesn’t look away from the mercenaries, holding his sidearm in his right hand and the confiscated gun in his offhand, his left.  When the mercs ask for some kind of splint for the injured guy, via Hetty’s translation, it’s Deeks who yanks out a pantry shelf and slides it over to them.

At Cougar’s gesture, Deeks picks up the second confiscated machine pistol from the counter.

Roque says to Cougar, “You watch the mercs, keep the civvies moving, right?  Hetty’s team should take supplies down.  We’re not gonna make Bagram in a one-night push, and they’ve been shorting these folks on food for weeks.”

“I can also guard for a bit,” Hetty says to him, moving the Romanian gun in her lap.

Roque doesn’t even blink.  “Sure.”  He tells her directions for where he wants the rest of the people from the cells to go.  Somewhere further down among the corridors, Clay has been unlocking doors and leg irons, he’s still sorting out how to get the disabled there on the move.  There were more than nineteen prisoners, too. 

From his occasional grunts and comments on the comm, Clay is pissed off at the conditions he’s finding.  He’s picked up a digital camera from somewhere and he’s using it.  “Rocks in socks, go knock some blocks, get outta these doors and wipe up these floors--” he rhymes quietly when he aims the camera, same as when he uses one of the bigger guns.  Cougar suspects there was a helluva lot of early Chicago-style rapping way back in Clay’s high school history.  Clay growls that he wants both Pooch and Jensen to store his pictures safely, in at least two different places.  If this is an American-run operation under Max’s control, Clay is going to blow up his chain of command with those pictures.

Roque says, “So, send your pretties here down to the trucks with pantry stuff, help them load up people too. We’ll send Jensen and Hetty back up here, he needs to grab fricken’ computer intel from the labs anyway.  Damnfool tech messed up his feet again.  Put him in her wheelchair, put her on a trolley tied to his handles, he can drag everything around with his monkey arms.”

Cougar nods.  “How’d you hit so many mercs?”

“After you knocked out all the guards in front--” Roque begins.

“Only five on the front, three on the back rocks,” Cougar says.  He nods toward Hetty.  “Had to be Hetty’s guy outside.”

Hetty nods.

Roque snorts.  “Figures.  So we saw nobody was moving in front for ten minutes, we went in, Clay and I blew the cafeteria and barracks.  They only had one area for barracks, damn fools,” Roque growls.  He waves his gun muzzle at the mercs.  “These assholes were down by the cells, doing their fucking _jobs,_ or I’d have nailed their sorry asses too, and they know it.  Get Jensen and Hetty to do a quick pass through the labs, maybe Hetty can pick out one of the eggheads to help them sort out major tech stuff to go with us, and what needs to get fucking blown to shit.  Get somebody from our teams to guard them for that, and then we’re done and I’m blowing this joint.  I gotta go check the hangar level for more labs, but we know Pooch can’t get the helo in that way.”

Cougar nods, and the big guy is striding off.

“Is he always that pissed off?” Deeks says.

Hetty chuckles.

Cougar quirks a smile, tilts the hat at Hetty in amusement.  She nods, and has Deeks turn her chair so she can give directions on which supplies she recognizes as useful.  It seems she’s the best cook of all four of them.  “There, grab those bags of flour.  Cans of shortening.  Some salt, some leavening-- that’s good.”

Kensi fetches a stray kitchen cart shoved into the back of the dark pantry.  “Right, plus any stuff we can eat out of the cans, right?”  She starts piling on large cans of beets, chopped pork, and fruit salad in syrup.

“Plus some can openers,” Deeks says firmly, and makes Hetty laugh. 

Hetty says, “Pile cooking utensils in that big soup bowl, I can hold that on my lap.  We can fry flat bread if we have wood.  Right, done, we’re full up, let’s head down to meet Corporal Jensen.”  She salutes, and her team starts pushing her and the kitchen cart away among the ex-prisoners.

In a few minutes, Clay appears, walking among a tail of six more limping civilians.  He’s bracing up one guy who’s using a curtain rod as an improvised cane, and pushing gently at a woman who is mumbling to herself continuously.  He’s also got a camera swinging in his jacket pocket.  Clay makes a face.  “Solitary,” Clay says.

Cougar nods.

“Far as I can, tell that’s it.  Went through the barracks and the cafeteria on the way down.  One of Hetty’s guys got in there ahead of us, so we’re done there.”  Clay looks at the mercs for a long dark moment.  “They can carry their wounded guy.  Give ‘em something to do.  You had ‘em strip or turn out their pockets yet?”

“No,” Cougar says.

“How many civvies we got?”

“Twenty-eight so far,” Cougar says.  “Plus whoever got out before, with Roque.”

“Christ, we’ll need more supplies.  I had the first liberated folks grab stuff from the barracks, but we couldn’t get inside there very far.  We got all the med supplies we could, sent that down first thing, so people get treated before they get in the trucks.”

Cougar nods toward the slowest ex-prisoner limping along.  “We’ll need bandages, antiseptic, sutures, antibiotics--”

“Folks from the cells have a few who know some field medicine, thank God.  They’ll need you for the harder stuff.”

Cougar tilts the hat, but he doesn’t take his eyes off the mercs.  They’re just guys, most of them hard-assed half-literate guys who grew up in Soviet housing or satellite state collective farms, doing the best they know how.  They’re caught now on the bad side of what was a pretty soft assignment.  They just want to go home safe, now that the pay and the canned peaches aren’t worth the risks.  Some of them have minor cuts and bruises, limping.

Cry me a river, Cougar thinks.  He’s been on the wrong end of fists just like those.

“Yeah, they’re gonna be a PITA,” Clay says.

“Do we need them?”

“CENTCOM will want ‘em if we can manage.”

“Got any able prisoners to help on watches?” Cougar asks.

Clay smiles.  “Maybe three.”

“Bagram detention squads better meet us halfway,” Cougar says flatly.

“Or you’ll take care of our escape problem for us?”

Cougar shrugs.  He hasn’t even seen Clay’s nasty cell pictures yet.  “It won’t bother me.”

“Yeah, I know,” Clay says.  He doesn’t try to touch Cougar.  He just nods once.  “I’ll send back Roque or one of Hetty’s people to help you move them.”  He speaks to the lame guy from the solitary cells in some Slavic language, hoists him into motion, and starts the mumbling woman moving along after the rest of the ex-prisoners.

It’s only a few moments more, mostly occupied by groaning from the merc who was shot, before Cougar hears the rumble of a kitchen trolley moving along in odd jerks and catches.  He hears the singing, too.  Jensen’s back to singing ‘Werewolves of London’ while he pushes himself in the wheelchair Hetty was using.

“Oh, lookie, you broke one.  You guys are _so_ hard on your stuff, you know?”

“Roque’s.”  Cougar points the confiscated gun at the body on the floor.  “ _Mine_.”

Jensen looks up at the mercs.  “Aaaand now they all know what to expect if they spook you even just a little bit, right?”

Cougar grunts, skeptical.

“Cougs, you are a bad bad ass, and I kinda love you.”  He starts whistling the sliding notes of a theme infamous in many, many spoofs:  _The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly._

“For shooting a fool?”

“No, for making sure the other fools know better now, so _we_ don’t have to shoot the whole damn squad.  You just gave ‘em a chance to survive a lot of bad choices here.”  Jensen shakes his head.  “A whole lotta bad choices.  Boy, does this place bring back the memories, really--” he starts singing a note, and stops when Cougar points a warning thumb at him.

“Hopefully they’ll remember it later,” Hetty says grimly.  She is sitting atop the kitchen trolley, which is roped behind Jensen’s wheelchair handlebars and frame.  Or what used to be Hetty’s wheelchair.  Jensen pulls the cart around behind him in a circle, parking them both by the pantry door under Hetty’s murmured command as if wheeling their combined weight doesn’t bother his arms at all.  He’s whistling that maddening theme song again. 

“So have you guys seen the original movie?  Right, I guess that makes me Blondie, and _you’re_ obviously Tuco, the Extremely Badass Bad,” Jensen says cheerfully to Cougar.

Hetty says, amused, “Can I claim the part of Ugly, or is that one taken?”

“That’s Roque,” Cougar says, not looking away from the mercs.  He hasn’t missed the stir among the mercs.  They’re ignoring Hetty, odd as she looks hanging onto the top of the kitchen cart, but they’re staring at Jensen.  Oh, they recognize _him._ There’s mutters.  He knows Hetty hasn’t missed it either.  She’s probably listening to all of that past Jensen’s chatter, understanding far more of it than Cougar does.  He feels like a schoolteacher watching a bunch of incompetent boys fumbling around trying to hide something from him.  He sights his gun warningly at them.  “Cover for me, Miss Hetty.”

“Of course.”  She has that Romanian gun in her hand.

He puts down the second confiscated merc gun on the nearby kitchen counter and slides one arm out of his backpack.  One-handed he unzips it, pulls out a small leather pouch and a y-shaped piece of wood with a heavy rubber slotted into a leather sling.  The pouch yields a couple of smooth pebbles, which he slides into his jacket pocket.

“Awesome!” Jensen crows.

Cougar ignores this distraction.  He hands the confiscated merc gun to Hetty, holsters his own sidearm with the mag still in it.  He slides a pebble out of his pocket, puts it in the sling.  He holds it up, swinging it in a wide gesture, showing it to the mercs.  Then he pulls the sling taut like an archer, full arm’s length.  Without looking in that direction at all, he shoots the pebble at a pot hung from a rack overhead.  The pot bounces around the ceiling and falls, spinning on the floor.

It also has a hole in it now.

Then he smiles at the mercs.  “Behave,” he says, and nods at Hetty to translate for him.  She seems to take a certain amount of pleasure in doing so.

“Was that pot all, like, rusty and shit and ready to fall apart anyway?” Jensen whispers.

Cougar quirks his brow upward.  “No.” 

He stalks away down the kitchen, retrieves the pot, lets Jensen look at it.  Then he tosses it negligently at the mercs, who are looking demoralized, a very good thing.

He still wishes he could have used the slingshot earlier, using it to bolo a rope across the cave crossings.  It’ll take experimenting to get it to working reliably enough.

He makes the beckoning gesture at the pot, finally, and the mercs slide it over on the floor back toward him.  Then he lifts the slingshot in one hand, points it at one of the guys on the end, uses the forefinger on his free hand to point at the guy’s middle.  Then he makes the beckoning gesture again.

There’s a moment of disbelief and jerky panicky gestures, and the designated guy finally, at long last, rakes through his pockets, searching.  He produces a little handbag-size gun.  Almost a toy.  Almost.  He opens it, shows that he’s taking out the little shells, drops them on the floor.  Then he bends down, puts the gun on the floor, pushes it toward them gently with his boot, and steps back again with the others, visibly sweating.  There’s hissing comments back and forth, and glares from some of the clearly senior guys in the group.

Cougar stuffs the slingshot in his pocket, walks forward, scoops up the little gun, stuffs it in a  little inside jacket pocket.  Then he pauses, looking at them, holds out his empty hands to each side, inviting a dance.  And he smiles.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This one was inspired much more by Oscar Jaenada's other performances as an utter crazy. When he was younger he was playing characters who take the role of sacred clown seriously and who will get fierce and make his audiences hideously uncomfortable. If he was playing a Fool, he was playing a scary one. You see this in movies like Noviembre. By the time he was playing the lead in the Spanish tv series Piratas, IMHO, he looked like he had become comfortable playing a fool, small f, without the need to protect the character's power and dignity in any way. Comedy is hard!


	13. Never Let Up

Nobody responds to the offer.

He quirks his eyebrow at them, pausing as if to make sure, and then he turns his back on them and strolls back to his position.

Jensen is just staring up at him.  “Damn, I thought I had _me_ some crazy, but you--”

Cougar quirks the brow at him, too, and makes the hands-out inviting gesture.  _Bring it._

Jensen just shakes his head and laughs.  “It does feel way too good to see some of these tinpot jerks pee their pants like that, just gotta tell you.”

Cougar makes a little bowing gesture.  But his hand is sliding into his jacket pocket after his own sidearm, bringing it up ready.

Jensen rubs his hands together.  “Where do we start with them, Miss Hetty?”

Hetty says in a confidential little purr, “You lived here awhile, Jensen?  More then two weeks, right? Tell us something about these gentlemen.  Give us an idea what language they use at home, who they are, what they do.”

“You mean, pick out the officers, right?”

“Among everything else you know.”

“It’s gonna take awhile.”

“Well, yes.  You do have an excellent memory.”

“Chief camper is the mustached guy with the scar, at the right side,” Jensen says easily.  “His SIC is the older guy at the other end.  He’s not so bad personally, but he doesn’t stop the other guys at the games they pull.”

“I recall what you told me, yes,” Hetty says.

Jensen gives her a quick rundown on the others, the guy who likes to play Vegas-style poker games, the guy who whistles, the guy who gets kidded about snoring, the guy who likes to beat up people in the corridor outside the cells in that blind spot where nobody in charge can see them, and so on.  It sounds a pretty basic bunch, heavy on the sedentary bad habits, light on the actual soldiering skills.

These weren’t the guys climbing the rocks.  Not the kind of guys Cougar was expecting after the few ex-KGB hardasses he shot outside amongst the regulars, not after seeing the stolen gear Kensi and Deeks were wearing.  This may be garrison command, but it’s not the command who ran the real soldiers outside.  This bunch?  Kind of pathetic Colonel Klink territory, come right down to it.  Not what the Losers expect on their usual jobs.  This average-joe incompetence is _not_ the kind of thing you can count on when you’re entering strange compounds where the boss is a drug cartel _jefe_ or a terrorist cell leader, where they kill somebody who fails to keep very good track of things. 

Cougar is wondering now if they need to worry about somebody with real soldiering skills in ambush outside.  But no, not his job just now; that’s up to Clay and Roque and Hetty’s guy Callen, outside.  He turns his attention back to guarding, holding his sidearm openly while moving around to provide what Jensen needs, plugging in the laptop and getting him set up to check on the stuff Hetty will get in questioning.  Not so much bedrock in the way here, as Jensen’s getting satellite signal.  That lighter structure to the building means Roque can blow support pillars more easily.

When they’re ready, Cougar goes back to the mercs.  With the beckoning gesture, Cougar starts cutting individuals out of the herd, pulling forward the first guy that Hetty wants to talk to, steering him over to one side in the pantry where the others can’t see it, where they can’t hear the guy unless he’s shouting.  Under Hetty’s soft direction, he makes each one in turn empty his pockets, strip down, and get dressed again without his boots.

Jensen has wheeled himself around so he has an eye on both sides, backing up both Hetty asking questions and Cougar with the crowd of mercs.  Hetty’s given Jensen the other confiscated gun.

Hetty is good at interviews, sliding in smoothly to get what she wants, testing if the guy wants to be friends with his new bosses now.  It’s kind of disgusting how many of them do.  But the Losers have been through that test a few times, and they didn’t _obey orders._  They did not stand around knockneed and cow-eyed like this.  The Losers ended up either escaping, getting beat to shit, or getting locked in irons until they got rescued.  Cougar is alert to body mass and gestures, pupil dilation, gaze direction, so he’s not interacting like a normal human, and his inner contempt isn’t showing.  A good thing, as that would make things harder for Hetty.

Hetty is also very consistent in how she handles the transitions, which makes it easier for Cougar to move one guy back and pick up another.  She pauses between one merc and the next sometimes, she checks with Jensen on what he’s researching for her, telling him sequences of translated dialogue to type in verbatim as part of the records she wants kept on the place.  She’s extra careful of the wording when she’s reciting anything they gave her about Max or Wade.  She has a very good memory too.

Cougar doesn’t focus on those details.  He watches the mercs, watches the changes visible as Hetty gets to them one at a time.  The cocky ones come back subdued, but not crazy.  The dim ones come back a little more sorted out, the sneaky ones look befuddled.  It’s beautiful to watch.  Cougar lets them mutter at one another and discuss it, as long as they’re not too obvious.  Hetty knows they’ll talk with each other, so it’s part of the calculations going into what she says.

Give her a week and she’d have them welded up loyal to her, functioning as part of her own troops.  Not reliable ones, yet, but eager to prove themselves.  They’d regard Hetty as a far better choice of commander than any of their old ones.  Even the guard commander himself looks dimly hopeful when she gets done with him.  Which is probably the most idiotic of all, since Hetty is not the sort to get sentimental about her tools.

She’ll drive her team until they break, if the job calls for it.  She could recruit any of the Losers except for that one simple thing.  None of them are dumb enough to fall for _that_ one.  Especially not Cougar.  Not after the last two teams, the ones he lost.

And it’s so _damn_ attractive a temptation too.  Ask Hetty to pick him up as a liaison until his Army hitch is done, get her help to make the Company leave him alone--snipers never leave the service on their own two feet, is the story--and finally get himself tucked away in a nice civilian job with her crew, tease Kensi and Deeks, do whatever undercover work it is they do.  Hit the beach all the time, drive around a nice sports car to a different restaurant every night for the rest of his life.  His grandmothers and aunts would approve of his career choice, until they learned too much about what it entails.

Oh, there might be some conflicts in retraining all those lethal-force reflexes, he’d have to cope with copshop pettyfogging paperwork and chatter, and there’d be head-butting where the simple answer is to shoot the fools, as it is right now.  And he knows--oh shit, does he know--that Hetty’s offer is right there, waiting, if he wants to pick it up.

For Jensen, too, that’s pretty clear.

But Hetty is going to get her people killed one of these days.  Same as Clay will, eventually, but Hetty’s team will die a lot slower, with a lot more screaming involved.  Her battles are in the dark, groping for anything tangible to grab onto, trying to prove something to somebody who doesn’t want to hear it, who got paid by the wrong side to buy the stories, somebody who wants the cops to fail.  He hasn’t asked her the obvious question:  What the _hell_ are they doing over here, with Hetty injured and armed with a Romanian gun, completely off her own turf --wherever _that_ is.

Cougar can pin the other team’s regular home down to four different counties on the West Coast, but as for finding their office on a real street--well, that’s still searching a roadmap as dense as a computer chip design.  Even when Hetty was working with Clay on the airship debacle, she never actually revealed where her authority came from, who authorized her involvement, what their real acronyms were, or where her team was based. 

Cougar does have the amusing thought of mentioning some pertinent details to Jensen just to see what the tech can find out--but not until Jensen is officially theirs.  Then Clay will make damn sure that Jensen gets the equipment and clearance levels high enough to do a righteous job of it.  Cougar is amused by the idea of throwing Kensi and Deeks and Jensen in the same blender, shake well, add tango, and watch the fireworks light up.

Hetty might even encourage it, just to see what Jensen is made of.  Cougar is pretty sure Jensen will give either team a real bronco ride.  At a guess, Jensen is the sort who flips on a spotlight in a dark room and start happily stomping roaches scattering in all directions.  That wacko personality probably fits the Losers better than Hetty’s cops and spooks.

The Losers are supposed to have simple, obvious objectives.  There are the bad guys, get proof they do bad things, blow their sorry asses to Perdition and let God sort ‘em out.  Supposed to be.  Lately, trying to handle missions with the likes of Max fiddling around, it’s become more like the political fog Hetty’s team has to fight through.

The more Cougar watches the mercs shuffle around in the kitchen, taking turns getting a drink of water with a few plastic cups at the sink, the more Cougar is beginning to hate that guy Max, and his stooge Wade, and all the rest of them who were giving the orders at this place.  It wasn’t that these mercs were bad guys to start with.  They just weren’t good.  Not good enough officers to stand up to Max, or to control the bad apples they did get.  He can recognize the few sent here in a hurry to avoid problems elsewhere, transferred before they got canned.  Hetty’s got her hooks into one of those, just now, and he doesn’t like the tone he’s hearing from the guy, who’s blustering threats right back at Hetty.

“Cougar, we got a question for you,” Jensen says quietly, trying to sound calm, but he isn’t.  His voice is strained taut as a wire, a little too high and thready for normal.

Cougar turns slightly, standing in the doorway with his eyes watching the main group of mercs.

“Hetty wants to know if you can just lightly ding this guy for her.”

A nod from Hetty, confirming it, and he lifts the slingshot, loops a pebble into the sling, and nails the guy’s thigh with it.  The man goes down on the floor with a muffled yelp, and then he lays there, yelling in pain.

Cougar pulls another pebble, drops it in the sling, pulls it taut, and holds his gun steady at the side of the wooden Y-shape at the same time, watching the other mercs.  They look scared, tense, but nobody’s moving.  Cougar takes a step to one side, still watching the larger group, and aims the gun separately at the guy on the floor.  “Kill shot?”

“No, thank you, that is extremely helpful,” Hetty says.  She says something idiomatic in Ukrainian that Cougar doesn’t follow.

The guy yells back at her, and resumes cursing all of them.  Cougar considers nailing him again with a pebble in the mouth to stop him, but rejects the temptation.  It would bust out his teeth, break his jaw.  They already have one PITA injured merc to handle, two will just make things more difficult.  He looks at Hetty.  “Ask Clay if you want a cold kill.”

Hetty looks up at him steadily.  “Right, and thank you.”

Jensen has his mouth open, but he’s not making any noises.

Cougar nods at the guy clutching his leg, groaning something about a broken leg.  “Feel free to ask.”

Jensen mutters something that might be psych terminology, but he doesn’t sound either afraid or admiring.  More like... squirmy.  Dismayed.  Something.  Cougar knows this is how _normal_ people react when they see Cougar at his job.  “You really just...”

Cougar lifts a brow at him and moves back to a better position to watch the group of mercs.  “I won’t lose any sleep over that one _._ ”

 What’s interesting is that Hetty’s eyes are just as calm and cold as before.  “Indeed not.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Watching Linda Hunt deal thoughtfully with her subordinates and enemies as Hetty Lange is such a pleasure. You know Hetty would be one of the most formidable interrogators anybody has ever dealt with, and most people are not prepared to deal with such focused skills.


	14. Orfinks and Losers

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> These two teams have lots more in common than you'd expect.  
> And yes, Cougar feels kind of sorry for Hetty's team.

It’s a right pain to discover, after that one bad example, that too many of their other merc prisoners like to think of themselves as heroes.  The slingshot is handy for knocking them down without killing them and leaving them in considerable pain afterward, but not completely crippled in the way a bullet would tear them up.  It’ll take them a few days to get over the slingshot bruises.  Half of them are carrying the other half along the corridors down to the trucks before they even get past two corridor intersections.  By the time Roque and Cougar and Deeks are locking up the back of the truck where they’ve confined the guards, each one locked into his own bench of restraints, Cougar is about ready to shoot the lot.

“Easy, man,” Deeks says mildly.  “Oh hey, have you met my man Callen?”

Cougar turns, glances up at a guy who _does_ look convincing in the stolen merc gear.  Stark bones, face battered round the edges like a kickboxer, bristly scar-patched hair, and that odd staring look.  Hypervigilance, probably from childhood.  Cougar didn’t hear him walking up, either.  He heard Roque pad up behind him, but not this guy.

Roque growls at the guy, “Hear you’re what happened to those ex-KGB boys.”

“A few of them,” the guy says, wiping sweat off his skull with one arm, and he starts an unfamiliar finger-snap hand-smack series with Roque, making both of them grin.  Then he stares at Cougar, a nice long careful gaze like that from a fellow sniper.  “I hear you’re what happened to the rest of ‘em.”  He holds out a leathery hand.

Cougar grips it with a nod of thanks, which Callen returns.  “Only eight.  Miss any?”

“Maybe two.  Runaways, sorry.  We nailed all the good ones, I checked,” Callen says.

Deeks walks up, there’s nods all round.   Roque does a more complicated knuckle-tapping routine with the cop and growls, “Good seeing you again, Deek-man.”

“Hey, I hear you’ve stayed off blimps since last time, good call there.”

Roque grunts.  “They keep us out of the States.  Running out of Germany down to goddamn sandboxes, like we’re the only show they got, like their own Company spooks ain’t worth shit.”

“And you know why?” Callen says, grinning.

“Cause they ain’t worth shit?” Roque snaps.

“Compared to you guys?  C’mon.  You brought an 18-seat helo to the party and Clay apologizes that he didn’t snag anything bigger.  Gotta have _style_ to pull off that kinda shit.  Kensi was pretty impressed,” Deeks says, and he smiles at Cougar slowly.  Oh shit, it’s _that_ kind of smile.  There’s some tango in Mister Deeks' future, and apparently he’s looking forward to it, too.

Cougar rubs a sweaty brow with one finger, shaking his head.  Getting made, in the dark, by a girl cop barely in her twenties, hardly speaks to his competence as a sniper.  He flips his hand upward, waves at the rocks, and says, “She’s good.”

“Oh, yeah.  She knows some really damn good sniper-ass when she sees him, too.”

Cougar glances up under the brim of his hat, manages to smile back.

Deeks reaches out, slides an arm onto Cougar’s shoulders, leads him away toward Hetty and Jensen at one of the other trucks.  Deeks starts talking about where to find a decent tango dance studio in the City of Angels.

“Shit, man, how does he _do_ that?” Roque says behind them.

“Which one?  No, don’t tell me, let me guess.  Anybody else try to touch your guy Cougs tonight and he’d take their head off with his elbow.”

Clay’s loud step comes around the front of the truck to Roque and Callen, jingling keys in his hand. “Pretty much.  Well, except maybe your gal Kensi.  Cougar gets off on gals who are damned lethal.”

Roque snorts.  “He gets off on any kinda gals _let_ him.  Even the damn fugly ones who go chasing his bony lil ass.  _You’re_ the one gets off on lethal femmes, Clay.”

Callen sighs.  “The more things change, the more they stay the same, huh?”

In Cougar’s ear, Deeks chuckles.  “Aaaand we’ll just skip discussing the kind of _guys_ you get off on, right?”

“Sure.  Y tú?” Cougar doesn’t even try to correct the informal pronoun that comes out of his mouth.

“Lethal works for me.”  Deeks’ arm tightens a moment, relaxes.  Then his arm slides away, and he murmurs, “Lethal works very nicely for me.”  Then he’s turning to Hetty and Jensen and a couple of skinny ex-prisoners. 

The wobbling ex-prisoners are being helped up, sometimes half-carried, up into the back of the truck by a large black guy who’s even wider than Roque.  “This is Sam, he’s Callen’s partner.  Part of that body count would be his, too.”

Sam waves at them.  He’s careful with the fragile folk he’s lifting around like so many rag dolls.  He can’t be as huge as he looks, he can’t possibly be any bigger than a regular pro linebacker, but he looks... vast.  He _could_ snap anybody’s neck like a toothpick.  He probably could do it a lot faster than most of the guards in this place could see him move, and they’d _never_ hear him coming.  From the way his face looks when he examines their leg iron sores, there’s plenty of outrage stewing inside great big Sam, plenty of mad to take out on the jailers who allowed it to happen to these people.

 Cougar taps the brim of his hat in salute.  “No assigning him to ex-guards, sí?”

“That’s an affirmative.  Got a nice tension between that Special Ops patience and great big ol’ church-raised ethics and a truly nice rolling boil on that _temper.”_

“Like Roque.  So angry.”

Deeks chuckles.  “Just step aside, man, when you see the cracks starting.  When Sam’s starting to Hulk out, nothing stops that landslide.”

Cougar flicks up one eyebrow in agreement.

“Don’t tell me-- you know from Hulking out, huh?  You made Roque just _lose_ it, didn’t you?  There you were, minding your own business-- hey, the Man with the Hundred Knives, c’mon, where’d he stab you?”

Cougar surprises himself with a wry grin, and smacks his own ass where the scar doesn’t get seen by other folks nearly often enough for his tastes.  That was during an op in Ecuador, and way too far from any hospital.   “Kid stuff.  Four stitches, and he had to sew it up.”

“Oh man, what did the _reports_ look like?”

“They tell us to stop renting houses with stairs.”

Deeks cackles with laughter.   “Man, Hetty, you didn’t warn me this guy can kill ya with jokes.”

“I warned all of you that it was your own lookout if you followed me, playing with the Losers out here in the sandbox,” Hetty says briskly.

When Cougar glances down, he sees Jensen looking up at him with a strange expression on his face.  Kind of like a little kid who’s had all his candy taken from him, and yet he’s also trying to hide it.  Cougar almost misses it in the odd glancing light from the truck headlights.  Jensen keeps ducking his head.  Pouting, even, when Hetty is trying to get him to respond to questions.  He nods hastily and pounds away at his laptop.

Cougar doesn’t understand what’s going on until Deeks walks away past him, heading over to Sam.  Jensen’s eyes follows Deeks as if the cop is a threat of some kind, as if he’s trying to figure it all out.  Then he glances up over the cracked eyeglasses at Cougar, looking pained, puzzled.  Insulted, almost.   He’s doing it in full view of Hetty, too, who is watching them both.  She glances up at Cougar, and then over at Deeks, amused.

Oh, yeah.  Jensen saw Deeks resting his arm around Cougar without getting knocked down, hit, maimed, insulted, or even mildly rebuked.  Jensen shoots another unhappy look up at Cougar, and his lower lip actually sticks out for an instant.  Until he realizes Cougar is looking right back at him, levelly.  Jensen ducks his head away then, scowling at his laptop instead.

Cougar is kind of amazed.  How on earth does the guy have any spare energy to get bent out of shape about _that,_ and answer Hetty’s questions, and work on his laptop, past all the injuries?  Burning the candle at six ends all at once, the damn fool.  Jensen is _jealous._

Delightful--Jensen is going to object at the top of his lungs to the best lay Cougar’s ever going to have in months, the absolute chocolate ganache of an affaire with a toothsome twosome Cougar is looking forward to eating every inch of, given the chance.  But no, their newest unofficial Loser is already bent out of shape about Cougar’s sex life before _anything_ has happened.  He will probably figure out many ingenious ways to cockblock it, and will be hysterically inventive about punishing all concerned, when _none_ of it is any of his business.

When did Jensen decide that if _he_ couldn’t touch Cougar, nobody else will be allowed to either?

It’s infuriating.  Also, Cougar is a little worried that he _knows_ all of this as clearly as if Jensen was shouting at him.   He’s a sniper.  He’s been trained to read cues about behavior from body language at any distance.  What they never admit, in sniper training, is that _reading minds gets old really fast._

Jensen is muttering something at his laptop.  Talking sullenly to himself.  Not singing, the way he was on the helo.  “Get used to it, Jake, this is your life.  Of course it’s the feet-- gonna take months to get fit again.  Talk about a buzzkill.  Nobody that hot will bother with some nerd on crutches--well, unless handicaps are one of their kinks, and really, how likely is that--”

Hetty is looking down at him from her perch, smiling wryly, and then she flicks a sharp glance up at Cougar, who sighs a little.  He gives her a nod that makes her grin.

Cougar walks up to them, tugs on Jensen’s dirty shirt collar, grabs for a pulse, hangs on. He's the medic, he's got a right.  “How are the feet?”

“Fine, fine,” Jensen mutters, head down, tapping away at the keyboard.  “Pooch made me eat Russian antibiotics, taste awful.”

“Don’t chew.  Did you get Pooch to check your feet?”

“Uhh, no, I forgot to ask.”

Cougar thumps his neck with a thumb.  “Idiota.  Next time I tell Pooch when.  If you forget again, you get Roque.  He’s not as careful as we are.”

Jensen’s lip starts to stick out.  Then he blinks up at Cougar.  “Next time?”

“We bandage them in the morning,” Cougar says, and thumps his neck again.  “I have prisoners to guard.”

Jensen glances up at him.  “Cranky kitteh is cranky,” he says, which makes no sense, but it seems to amuse Jensen.  He gets a little shy smile on his face.  Then he glances aside at Hetty.  “Ready whenever you are, ma’am.”

She nods.  “Okay, we have one of the chemists, Monsignor Luke, waiting up there to help us go through the facility labs.  Deeks, are you ready to go with us?  Sam told me they were lucky enough to find more medical supplies.  He has some EMT training, and he can help you with translations, Cougar.”

“Right,” Deeks said wryly, glancing over at Cougar.

Cougar has the impression this is not the first time she has neatly cockblocked Deeks right there on the job, nor will it be the last time.  He just looks at Cougar wistfully, as if he thinks he’d rather enjoy slurping up Cougar all over like chocolate ganache.  Sometime.  Then he just... walks away.

Of course Hetty is watching Cougar watch Deeks’ ass walking away.  No point in feeling embarrassed about it.  There might as well be interpretative dance and hand signals and semaphores and cheerleaders with a marching band and a horn section tooting Dixieland jazz.  Subtle, yeah.

Hetty just smiles a little at him, sympathetically, which is the _worst._

Jensen is watching all this too.  Watching Hetty be amused at watching Cougar checking out another guy’s ass.  Jensen is suddenly much more cheerful, and starts humming to himself.  Something about changing places with the gorilla in the zoo.

Cougar gives Jensen a stern look, and he nods at the rocks above them, arching one brow.

“Yeah, I thought the plan was park the helo up in the hangar door,” Jensen responds as if he heard the question.  “But they jammed the corridors too badly after all.  Pooch said he’d land down here and load from the road.”

Cougar nods.  Then he gives Hetty a hat-brim salute with his finger, and heads off to help Sam.  The big guy has got half the job done already.  While loading up people in trucks, Sam sorted which ones needed immediate bandaging, and then he hauled out a table for examining injuries, and he made a fire and started boiling water in some of those kitchen pots.

Cougar takes off his climbing gloves, washes his hands with soap and a cupful of warm water from a metal canteen off Sam’s campfire.  There’s plenty of latex gloves, plenty of wipes and gauze and antiseptic wash.  There’s a lot of antibiotics that can treat STDs as well as injuries.  There’s even a packet with a sterile apron and mask, if not scrubs.  What they’re short on are the serious supplies that ought to be stocked in a place that’s this prone to rockslides and shooting accidents:  Shock cart equipment, IV supplies, bags of saline, sedatives, and less common antibiotics.  Cougar rakes through the inadequate supply of pain pills and topical numbing gels and uses them sparingly. 

Some of these folks have sores that go to the bone, that hurt like debriding burns do, and they don’t even yell when he’s cleaning the wound.  Some of them pass out first with crashing blood pressure and shock, but they don’t yell.  Whoever said science geeks are total wussies has never met scientists from former USSR-satellite countries with starved domestic budgets.

Blood supplies would be helpful, but they’ve only got a half-dozen IV packets and three bags of type O expiring sadly from one of the kitchen fridges.  Most of the patients have to make do with sports drinks that Jensen brings them to improve their fluids.

Jensen comes wheeling by twice with cartons of drinks.  He’s whistling that damn hook from the movie music, _The Good the Bad and the Ugly._ Twirling variations on it, even, as if he’s happy, though the weight of the bottles on his lap must be causing those feet a lot of pain.

“Now there’s a Tuco look, catch the glare!  Lucky us, we got Cougs rockin’ the ER scrubs like the baddest badass doctor drama ever--ooh, the fantasy just gets better all the time, doesn’t it?  So, umm, need anything else?  No?  Okay, give a yell, guys.”

Sam grins when he hears Cougar growling in Spanish, but that’s it, no teasing.  So even Sam notices Jensen’s mancrush is downright serious.  Dammit.  With people going into shock, there’s no time to explain Jensen to Sam if he wanted to.  Sam is fast on his feet too, _Dios mio._   Sam translates, he holds body parts steady, he holds flashlights, while Cougar works on cleaning open abrasion wounds and sewing up cuts.  No gut shots or major arteries, no  goofed shots, apparently they killed everybody they aimed at.

One ex-prisoner was shot by a guard in the melee when the generator lights went out.  Luckily, it’s just a clean forearm through-and-through and a couple of broken carpel bones in the palm.  That gets a brace improvised out of metal finger splints in Sam’s powerful hands.  There’s only two dislocations, injuries among the guardsmen when Roque’s bombs took down the barracks; Sam performs the swiftest reductions Cougar has ever seen.  Afterward, Sam carries the patients away with great care to keep the joint in alignment, no sign that he’s going to take out all that anger on the former guards.  Or at least, not them.

For those who will need the helo, Sam stretches them out on the limited number of blankets on the sandy side of the road, or seats them on rocks, or on extra mess chairs dragged outside.  Every time he walks past, Sam rechecks those patients who are waiting, fetches water for them, answers questions, rechecks bags of saline on the limited IVs, and he administers second doses of painkillers where he has to.  Sam has an excellent memory for what Cougar told him they needed.

When the helo does show up, blowing dust everywhere, Sam goes off to load up those folks who are ready for it.  Cougar works by himself with hand gestures to understand the people left waiting, those who weren’t so badly hurt.  When Sam is back, Cougar is very glad to have his translation help.  Once Cougar is done with them, Sam leads these healthier ones off to a seat in one of the trucks, sorting them to sit by a buddy they already know, someone who can take care of them during the trip.

Last, and most strenuous job of all, Cougar works on Roque’s victim, the gunshot knee.  The joint is a shattered mess, all he can do is try to clean the two through-and-through holes in the quads and immobilize the ragged joint firmly and help the guy swallow sports drink to get his fluids back up.  The guard has to travel in the helo, which will cause plenty of jolting and stress as it is.  When Cougar glances up, expecting to hunt for somebody to carry the plank the guy is strapped to, Sam and Callen are right there.

Between the two of them they haul the guard up into the helo.  No sign of that earlier anger, just blank faces.  Neither of them are rough when they’re handling the injured guard.  They’re just very controlled when they’re lifting him up, moving him around inside the cabin to find space.

When Callen returns, he taps Cougar on the shoulder, steps back sharply as Cougar straightens with a startled jerk from staring at the supplies.  Sam is standing there too.  Sam claps him on the shoulder. “That’s it, you’re done for now.”

Cougar blinks up at them, pulling off bloody gloves inside out.  Then he blinks at the horizon, where pale orange is showing through the dusty brown haze.  He doesn’t normally lose track of his surroundings so completely while he’s patching people.  The Losers rarely have that luxury.  He glances down at the supplies again.  The old habit of precision while working saves a lot of cleanup.

 “That’s some focus you got there, buddy.”

Cougar nods, wipes sweat off his mustache and beard.  Their function as sweatrags are just more good reasons to keep them.  Then he swipes his knuckles at his brows under the hat brim, and blinks again when Sam shoves a bottle of water under his nose, and then an MRE bag, and pushes on his shoulder, steering him to a rock to sit down.  Cougar props himself there a moment, and then starts pushing himself up again.  “Recheck-- two hours--”

“Nope, stay down, we’ve got it,” Sam says, and he’s a damn wide wall of solid man.  “You told us which ones need changing again, we’ve got it.  Just let me get the box, Callen and me, we’ll take it around the trucks.”

Callen grins, used to Sam’s habits.  “Just sit, take a break.  Eat something, man.  When your buddy Jensen gets back with Hetty, we’re all gonna be hauling ass hard enough.”

Cougar blinks down at the MRE bag, and finally rips it open and starts pouring water into the stew box.  The smell gets to him.  Rather than wait for it to finish heating, he starts eating the other food in the bag.  By the time he’s spooning up gravy, he notices the cooking gear by the fires.  Pooch and Clay and Jensen have been getting the ex-prisoners fed while Cougar was busy clipping tape and sewing and checking blood pressure.  “Done?” he asks Clay.

Clay grunts _yes_ at the question.  He’s walking back and forth, hauling familiar boxes with warnings stamped in Russian.  And yes, there’s  Roque kneeling by the front entrance of the complex, laying wires.  There won’t be much left of it by the time he gets done.  Roque doesn’t have a problem building huge explosions.  He’s always much more concerned about making it _small_ enough, getting it right on limiting his blast radius.

At an odd sand-scrunching noise, Cougar glances up, blinks at Jensen’s departing wheelchair.  The tech seems to be fetching smaller bags for Roque, answering questions.  So Cougar eats, ignoring the noises of Jensen’s wheelchair moving about.  Jensen is gone for awhile, he returns, he goes again.  The crunchy sand noise under the rubber wheels finally comes right up to Cougar, settles, making him glance up.

He blinks into Jensen’s face, where those astonishing blue eyes are magnified in the cracked glasses.  Jensen reaches out a long arm and presents him with...something.  Jensen starts smiling at him, holding out a strange acid yellow bag with Easter markings on the label.

“Peeps,” he says, opening the wrapper like it’s a striptease.  “Peeps never go stale.  _Candy,_ Cougs.  They had _candy_ down in the labs.”

Cougar gazes at it, perplexed.  When Jensen holds out a single nauseatingly yellow candy baby chick, he accepts it.  Takes a cautious bite of it.  “Always stale,” he says, making a face.

“But it’s sugar, and you’re too skinny!  Mister Scary said so, even!”  Jensen leans forward in the chair, cupping his hand around his mouth and whispering.  _“I saved the chocolate for later.”_

Cougar gazes at him, holding his MRE bag in one hand, a half-eaten Peep in the other.  “Thank you.”  It takes awhile to think what to do next.  He may be a little too tired to string words together.  He offers the Peep to Jensen, who takes it back as if he doesn’t mind Cougar-germs a bit.

“You have a pretty narrow bite-radius for how tall you are,” Jensen says, gazing at the Peep in his hand.  “What?  No, really, you have this narrow biting-biter-alligator mouth.  Long in the jaw on the side, pointed across the chin.  Slide right in deep and bite like a mofo.  Or a vampire, if you had the fangs.  No fangs?  Well darn, because that would be cool.”  Jensen eats the rest of the mangled Peep.

“No sparkle,” Cougar says, which is just more proof he’s getting pretty damn loopy.

“Yeah!  No sparkle!”  Jensen pops out another Peep from the package, waves it in the air with zooming noises, roars evol mastermind laughter at it, and gulps it whole.  Then he says, “Okay, so you’ve got a narrow jaw like a wolf or a cat’s muzzle.  That’s not why you’re called Cougar, though, is it?”

Cougar adds water to the second meal, starts spooning it up.  “No.”

“Aaaand you’re not going to tell me that story?”

“Not now.  Prisoners.”

“You’re falling asleep!”

Cougar waves that off. “What watches did Clay set?”

“Dunno.  Want me to find out?”  Jensen perks up.  He _likes_ being given things to do--a very good trait in a teammate, Cougar thinks.

“Thank you,” Cougar says again.  It seems inadequate.

“There will be chocolate later, after you’ve done my evol will!  For chocolate, you have to do what I say, bwahahahah!”

Cougar scrunches his brows together.  “You say a lot of things.”

“So you’ll have plenty of choices, right?  It’s not like I have to be an _inconsiderate_ evol mastermind.”

Roque says, looming up right behind Jensen, “What kind of balderdash piddle-headed melarkey are you saying?  Goddamn _alien--_   I don’t even--”

Cougar shifts his left hand with the MRE bag, waving it off tiredly: _Don’t worry._ Then he points at the candy.  “Sugar,” he says to Roque.

Thus prompted, Jensen offers the open box to their SIC, who gazes at it suspiciously.

The sight of their Lieutenant frowning at lethal stoplight-yellow candy chicks, putting out a hand like he’s defusing a bomb and slowly, slowly putting it in his mouth, is one that will return to Cougar’s mind for years to come.

Jensen just smiles, pleased.  It’s as if he doesn’t even realize when he’s subverting the ruling paradigm in significant ways, such as when he’s just made one of the most dangerous men Cougar knows look totally and absolutely ridiculous.

Roque knows it’s a little strange.  He gazes sternly at Jensen.  With the long scar on his face, his glare is pretty damn effective.  He growls, “I used to love these things when I was a kid.”

“Yeah, see, that’s the point, the stuff you wanted _so bad_ when you were a kid and--”

Roque makes a sour face, swallows it whole, pulls out his water bottle, and spits.  “Jeezus, that’s _terrible_ stuff.  What the hell, it _always_ was, but damn, I could eat those all day when I was a kid.”  Then he shocks Cougar by looking straight down into Jensen’s gaze and adding, “Like the only time I wasn’t starving was when I got enough of those things.”

“Yeah,” Jensen agrees fervently, nodding.

“You went hungry as a kid,” Roque says levelly.

“Sure, my sister and I could never tell when we’d have enough money to go to the store.  We had to figure it out between the bills and overdraft charges and kinda scrounge help from the neighbors--”

“So that’s why you joined the Army?” Roque says.

“Sure.  See, there I was, senior year in high school, when my sister got pregnant--long story, not her fault, poor kid--anyway, at her seventh month she couldn’t stand up waitressing any more, I figured we had to get her into some training, get some certificates for better work after the baby was born, and she did it, man.  Now she’s got a decent gig working from home, and I help pay for stuff like school fees now my niece is older-- I got pictures of her and the puppy, if you want to see--”

“What kind of dog?”

“Oh, he’s a retriever kinda mutt we found abandoned in the road, got hit by a truck, just scraped up, lucky it wasn’t worse--  Here, see, these are the pictures she took at the vet--yeah, pathetic, isn’t it?  Just look at those sad, sad eyes!-- and, hey, sorry, this next one is taking awhile to load, the sat connection is way low strength down here--”

Cougar smiles to himself, eats the last energy bar, and gives them a wave as he stands up and stretches.  He puts on his shooting gloves and checks his gun and ammo, slides on the rifle sling.  He pulls loose his slingshot, pockets a couple of pebbles, starts walking to ease the stiffness.  He finds everybody else is busy hauling tech gear from the complex down to the trucks.  Deeks and Kensi are sorting through the ammo locker box they found, and he’s able to help ID some of that wacko collection of antique Soviet leftovers.

By the time he comes back around, Roque is still talking dogs with Jensen, and he won’t disturb that conversation.  Instead he finds Callen, asks him along to check on the ex-guards.  It’s been four hours since he was standing in the kitchen, it’s already time to start food and restroom breaks for those guys, as Pooch is still swearing over refilling the spare truck tires, and it’s going to be a slow trip getting this lot onto paved roads and taking the highway north to Bagram. 

Handling the ex-guards is a partner job even when each prisoner is locked down.  Cougar has been jumped a few too many times before.  He wants somebody good with him when he’s making sure all the former guards have got water, when he’s starting to work on passing out packaged food, handling the latrine trips.  In the back of truck, under those defeated glares, he doesn’t dare lose focus and get drowsy.  But he knows for sure he better not drive that truck, he’d go off the road inside an hour.  They’re going to need to alternate duties efficiently so everybody can get some rest.

“What’s that?” Callen says sharply, standing guard outside the truck.

Cougar jumps down from the trailer tailgate, adjusts his earpiece.  On the comm he hears a high crowing noise, a whistle, and then laughter.  It’s as good as an announcement.  He glances up at Callen.  “Rogue just blew up the prison block.”

Cougar glances in at their load of ex-guards while Callen reaches up for the door strap.  Callen drags down the trailer’s sliding door, slams it down, latches it.  “Guess he enjoys his work.”

Cougar snorts.  “Doesn’t leave much when he blows up shit.”

Callen tilts his head.  “Huh.  He told me clearing mines and defusing bombs was too damn boring.”

Cougar shrugs.  “Good at it.  But he likes to blow shit up.”

There’s another yelp in his earpiece.  Even at this distance, they can hear a rumbling that goes on for awhile.  Cougar calls it as he hears it:  “Elevators, support pillars, and the main entrances into the caves.”

A sharper, concussive jarring shakes the ground, and a plume of dust rises.

“And that’s the front door?”

Cougar squints.  “Yeah, looks like.”

“So on the crazy scale, Roque’s not exactly--”

Cougar shrugs.  He turns at the crunch of sand under shoes.

“I do like a man who really enjoys his work.”  Clay walks up reeking of woodsmoke and burnt flour.  He’s got splotches of gray wood ash across the front of his rumpled suit jacket.  His hair is coated gray with dust from the explosions.

Callen slants a look over at Cougar, who just quirks a smile under the brim of the hat.  It’s the Losers, man.  What is there to say?

Clay nods to both of them.  “Okay, guys, road trip assignments.  Cougar, you’re on the helo.  See if we’ve got enough medical supplies loaded up on the helo, and then sack out as much as you can.  God knows the patients are going to need rechecking on the flight.  The helo runs up and offloads patients at Bagram, comes back to find us, so you’re part-time eyes in the sky.  Hetty and Jensen are with you, Jensen runs comm when he’s in range.  Deeks will run both systems for us at the trucks when you guys are gone.  Hetty’s team and you have their comms, Roque and I still have our system.”

Clay nods at Callen.  “Talk to Hetty to confirm, but she agreed you’re leading the truck caravan with the youngest folks to help us out if there’s any problems with the road going out, rockfalls, ambushes.  Sam drives the second truck loaded with the tech and some of the healthier folks who know about it.  Couple more trucks with some ex-prisoners driving.  They’re loaded loose so we can drop out two trucks in trouble and still keep everything moving.  Roque drives the truck with the mercs locked in, second from last, Kensi is on shotgun with him.  I’m driving drag with Deeks on shotgun, we’ve got the walking wounded.  As I said, Deeks is running both comm systems when the helo’s out of range.  My load also has some younger folks out of the cells, in case Roque needs backup with his truck of mercs.  All the drivers have directions copied in their own language, everybody riding shotgun has weapons they know how to use.  What I’m worried about is flats or IEDs or engine failures on this washboard dirt, and the first fifty miles of paved.  Any questions?”

Cougar taps his hatbrim up..  “Where are we meeting Bagram’s squads?”

Clay makes a sour face.  “Still negotiating that one.  Depends how good a time we make down canyon today.  Once we get going out of Chora, it’s only like 350 miles, maybe seven hours to Bagram, but our trucks might not do that good a time.  The squads from Bagram could meet us, easy, at any of the stops along the 76.”

Cougar grunts.  “Wade?”

Callen gets that one.  “Long gone.  Prisoners think he left before we got there.”

Clay squints at him, agreeing.  “Hetty said the guards reported strangers in some new merc uniform were yelling at the guard commander and clearing out the offices in the morning, loading boxes of paper before we even hit the depot.  _Something_ lit a fire under Wade’s ass.”

Cougar glances over at Jensen in the wheelchair, tilts his hat brim that way.

“Yeah, that whole diskie-ship escape mess could be it.  But Hetty says things broke up in the morning at least ten hours before our boy got loose.  She thinks that’s _how_ he got loose, they got distracted off guarding the diskie long enough for him to take it out.  Guards told her something happened that morning to set it off, lots of phone calls and yelling.  Plus, all the chatter they heard was about meetings in Kandahar, so we’re not heading there.  The helo needs to get the hell out of Bagram fast, just in case, before Max’s guys can redirect over there.”

Cougar looks at him doubtfully.  “Government-legal, or some side project?”

Clay rakes his fingers through his hair.  “Shit, I still don’t know.  Hetty’s only got crumbs to put together, Jensen’s running searches for her.  Haven’t heard yet.  Get some rest, Cougar.  We’ll need you all swapping shifts and walking perimeter when we stop-- hell, guess that’s tonight, now.”

Callen nods, grips Clay’s hand briefly.  “Hope the road is good for you.”

 “Yeah, so do I, and back at you.  Thanks for the help.”

Cougar sketches a salute at Callen, two fingers at his hat brim, and Callen waves as he walks away.  Then Cougar glances up at his CO, nods again.

Clay reaches out, grips his shoulder briefly.  “I hear there may be chocolate in your future.”

Cougar wiggles an eyebrow rudely, and gives a shrug, spreading his hands wide.  They can both hear Jensen happily talking dogs with Roque.  Cougar turns to look, and sees both men waving their hands.  Jensen is making faces, arguing about something like it matters.  Cougar gives his CO a wry look under the hatbrim.

“Yeah, yeah, I know.  We always were suckers for little orfinks and runaways,” Clay says.

Cougar taps his own chest, makes a flying-away gesture with one hand, taps his thumb firmly, twice, on the rumpled white shirt twisted over Clay’s sternum.

Clay gives him a crooked smile.  “Thanks, man.  You say the nicest things.”

 _“De nada.”_   Cougar tips the hat, and walks away.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you want to see a tiny woman be a complete and utter badass, watch Hetty Lange take on the Romanian bad guys and get shot and still keep talking. I saw either Hulu or YouTube footage, but I don't have the episode names handy, sorry. Feel free to provide that (and links would be great too!) in comments if you like.


	15. Surprises for Pooch

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> One of the reasons Pooch is so good at what he does is that, like his role model, McGyver, he knows his physics, not just his parts and substitutes and kludges and bad ideas. Yes, he undoubtedly reads manuals for amusement, besides gossiping with every mechanic he ever met. But he also tries things other people think are crazy, too.

“Goddamn me if I _ever_ come back to this sandbox again,” Pooch growls.

“Likewise,” Hetty says, in a dry tone, and Pooch grates out a sharp laugh over the comm. 

Cougar says, twisting his head, “On six-- no, seven, again.”

The Russian helo is faster and more maneuverable and dodges circles round them.  It looks like a Russian funhouse mirror version of the Special Snowflake helos, where everything is hardened and armored and heavy as hell, apparently hung with racks of armament for every scale of target.  The few symbols are in Cyrillic, but not helpful.  Size of those gas tanks, it probably drinks fuel like it is vodka.

Cougar flinches as a light shot pings harmlessly off the window he’s sitting by.

“Crap, they’re shooting more tinsel and anti-missile crap at us, trying to confuse telemetry,” Pooch says.  “Your loss, fools, we’re so old we ain’t even _got_ telemetry to screw up, just radio--”  Which is making weird staticky gobbling noises, so he’s turned it down. 

The Russian helo pilot isn’t quite as good as Pooch on maneuvers, even with all the fancy gear hung on that bird.  It’s twice as long and much heavier than Pooch’s craft, and Pooch has never met a cyclic he couldn’t do acrobatics with.  The military helo loses them sometimes as Pooch jinks around in and out of the canyons like a bug on a hot skillet.  But the damn thing always shows up again.  It’s been chasing them for an hour now since it first popped up behind them at Chora, which is a very long time in dogfight terms.  The Russian helo keeps heaving off warning shots that miss when they use heavy ammo, and when they hit anything directly, they’ve cut dings in Pooch’s rotors that add drag and damage fluid lines but don’t shoot them down outright.  The Russians are not hitting them with the kind of artillery that would take apart the passenger cabin.  Which is creepy.  They must want prisoners.

They seem frustrated that warning shots haven’t made Pooch do what they want and land where they indicate. 

Well, Pooch isn’t most pilots.

Pooch gave Cougar risky level flight for a few minutes to hang in the open cabin door with his heaviest gun.  One of his shots knocked the biggest missile right off the rack on the Russian bird.  That’s going to cost somebody some rubles to scout around and try to retrieve the pieces down there in the canyons before the Afghan kids can haul it out for the black market.

He didn’t bother testing the Russian cabin armor, no point in that.  The rotor mast took a direct hit and shrugged it off, the edges of the swash plate chipped and bent without failing, heavy ammo whanged off the main rotor blades and chipped the tail rotor but didn’t affect its flight.  The missile was the only thing he’s been able to impact in the wild gyrations between the two birds.  Dawdling about in level flight any longer was an unacceptable risk.  He’s given up on wasting ammo, he’s waiting for landing, when it will really be needed.

Which is why Cougar is tamely sitting down, watching the windows, tracking the other bird, and mostly looking at coal seams zip past at high speed.  And he’s lucky it’s such an easy flight for him.  Other folks are not having a good time of it.  Injured ex-prisoners are rolling around on the floor in their improvised restraints, crying with pain, some of them literally seasick with the motion of the helo.  Cougar hasn’t been able to help them much, just slap on more gauze and apply pressure to stop bleeding as he can, whenever the helo’s motion evens out enough to let him crawl around and check on people.

When the Russians let off on the radio interference and tried yelling at Pooch in a variety of languages, the Pooch laughed at them and made a sign at Jensen, who took the liberty of telling them to do something rude to themselves, in Cantonese.  Clearly, those two sneaky conspirators got busy conniving together earlier, in those precious twenty minutes when Cougar was wiped out, snoring across the seats.

Cougar is beginning to wonder which one of his fellow passengers is the target the Russian helo is chasing.  Could be Hetty, easily. Could be Jensen, ex-diskie pilot.  Could be one of the injured scientists or mathematicians in the cabin, but that speaks to a more elaborate knowledge of this evacuation than seems practical.  On the other hand, maybe this is just part of a larger op.  Maybe they’ve got forces going after the truck caravan also, they’re just covering all bases.  With the radio jammed again, the Pooch doesn’t know, nobody knows.

The Russian jamming shuts down Jensen’s radio sat-connection, he can’t get through to discuss it with Clay or Roque or any of Hetty’s people.  He’s communing with his laptop, attempting counter-jamming measures, and sometimes they get 20 or 30 seconds of clear air, where they can hear somebody screaming at them in Romanian.  Sounds like a woman’s voice.  Hetty is sure it’s Kensi trying to get through to them, just from the primitive vocabulary and lousy beginner’s grammar.  Hetty has been yelling back whenever she gets a hint of clear air to respond.

The Russian helo doesn’t seem worried about this incursion blowing up into an international incident, which sounds like Max’s type of arrogance.  The Russians may chase them all the way to Bagram, which is not a place where any aircraft can just crash the party uninvited.  But if Max is involved, it’s even possible the Russian bird has access to the day’s codebooks and they can make Black Ops claims and get help from Air Traffic Control a helluva easier than Pooch will be able to.

Bagram air traffic control won’t have any record of the Losers arriving in-country, they won’t know Clay or his team unless they talk to some senior folks in Virginia, and that’ll take way too long.  Pooch insists that they might know Cougar, because snipers get loaned around with plenty of commanders, moving on all the time to new units.  Get to the site, set up, take the shot, clear out without getting hit by your own side, get loaned to yet another outfit, travel to the next gig.  Before the Losers, Cougar got around a lot.  A whole lot, if you count all of Cougar’s hookups at bars just off base, including Bagram.

Pooch didn’t have to leer like that when he said it, though.  It made Jensen’s face twist around, fighting it.  Cougar snapped out one hand and thumped the nerdguy on the neck, and nodded toward Jensen’s feet.  Jensen sighed, agreeing he would get help at the airfield with the real medics.  Then he looked up over the glasses at Cougar with the worst puppy-dog gaze ever.  Cougar gave him a stern look, and pointed at the man’s feet, repeating his point.  Jensen held up both hands, promising.  Cougar settled back in his seat, placated.  He pretended he didn’t see that little smile on Hetty’s face, either.

“Where is that sick fuck--” Pooch growls, twisting his head.

“On your eight,” Cougar says.

“Huh. Jolene would tell you boys, ‘Anybody likes my tailpipe that much, they gotta buy me lunch _and_ dinner’,” Pooch says in a silly falsetto voice.

“And breakfast,” Hetty says, head twisting like an owl to observe the Russian craft  swinging around under them and up again on the opposite side.  She smiles right out the window at the bastards, waves, says something cheerfully in Romanian.  At least, he thinks it’s Romanian.  It’s not Russian _mat_ which she was using earlier on the air at the Russian pilot, impressing hell out of Pooch with her vocabulary.

If Pooch tries to play the emergency card at the edge of Bagram airspace, beg for mercy and ask for ambulances to offload the injured, that’s just going to see the Russian bird’s crew swoop in past the medics and take whoever they’re interested in before either the medics or the Bagram MPs know what’s happening.

Pooch already found out that hiding--setting down in a tiny box canyon, everybody collectively holding their breath--wasn’t worth a damn against Russian surveillance tech.  Pooch got them up and out of range just ten seconds before a missile strike dropped a crater where their skid tracks were.  Pooch says now the pilot knew perfectly well Pooch would get them out and it wouldn’t hit them, the asshole just wanted to give them a helluva scare. 

As scares go, it didn’t do much.  It sure didn’t stop Pooch dodging away and heading off for Bagram again.

Jensen accuses Pooch of being a Toon, quoting lines from the movie _Roger Rabbit_ , growling into his laptop like he’s Baby Herman chomping on a cigar and defying Judge Doom, until Pooch’s solemn face cracks finally into a laugh.  Pooch’s next maneuver is particularly loony, but it works, and then he keeps going with weird choices, throwing off the Russian. Seeing  the big fancy helo spin around waggling in midair, trying to spot them in their latest wacko stunt, makes Pooch cackle like a fiend.

“You did something technical to him, didn’t you?” Hetty says, smiling.

“Canyons, you gotta check those updrafts, man,” the Pooch agrees.  Get him talking, shouting back at things, he’s as bad as Jensen.  “Got him to swing round into that wind--yeah, dumb shit, have some decent damn FTE, breakfast of champions.  Eat your _Failure of Tail Efficiency_ and crash, you cheezy over-built hyped-up bird on steroids-- well damn, he got that backup fin going. How the hell did he remember where the button was?  You shoulda crashed, you know you should!”

Jensen claps one hand to his earpiece.  “What is _that_ \-- Cougs, do you hear--”

Cougar twists around, hearing a deep, powerful voom- _voom_ -voom bass noise in his earpiece, echoing weirdly on an otherwise jammed radio frequency.

Then he hears it in real life, vibrating in the helo’s frame, coming right through the cabin walls.  The vibrating noise, this time, is much more stable than it was before.  But it’s familiar.

With that belly-sinking dread of the inevitable, Cougar squints up at the sky for the round shape blotting out the sun above them.

There’s a carrousel-like squeal of tinny horns, there’s a very familiar theme song audible at their current airspeed--frighteningly loud--and the thing lights itself up in a splash worthy of a Disney theme park.  It is right above and behind them as if it’s ready to shoot them in the rear.

Pooch gives a wheezing noise that lost whatever words he started with.

The disk shape is now bright pink.  The unknown markings Cougar had memorized before are gone.  Instead, there are little animated figures trotting around in the opposite direction from the rapid spin of the ship.  Familiar drawings:  My Little Pony figures.  Cougar has seen them plenty of times while visiting his sisters’ families, listening to the children chatter happily at the tv screen.

“Look, there’s Applejack, she looks just like you, Cougs!  And there’s Pinkie Pie--” Jensen exclaims.

“Jensen, I think you’ve been quite some influence there,” Hetty remarks, peering out the window, blinking rapidly into the pink glare.

“Is this the same bird you shot all to shit, Cougar?  The one you fucking exploded?” Pooch yells.

“It may be.  Same size, same spacing of symbols, slightly better speed of rotation.  But the skin is whole now.”

“It’s the same,” Jensen breathes.  “I know it is.  God, just look at it.”

“We blew that thing apart and set _fire_ to it, Jensen, what the sweet screaming hell is _this?”_

“The fire must have regenerated it,” Jensen murmurs, spreading his fingertips on the window.  “It didn’t die, our weapons and the fire must have fed it energy--it had time to feed and rebuild and get back in the air--”

“You think maybe it holds a grudge, Jensen?  You think maybe we’re in a heap of--”

The Russian helo is shooting at the pink disk.  They seem to be shooting off everything they’ve got at it.  Stuff is bouncing.  Pooch backs off in a hurry, making Cougar’s stomach lurch as he’s grabbing to adjust the camera-scope on his gun.  He finally gets the camera aimed into the window, starts the scope’s video running.

“Uh uh, Russian guys, bad idea, I don’t think that’s going to do what you think it will--” Jensen starts to laugh, peering out the window.

The Russian strikes just splash across the pink surface and shatter harmlessly away, like splashes of fireworks, or the strikes just... disappear.  Sucked into it, somehow.  Harder, brighter lights like magnesium flares get sucked into the skin of it somehow.  The pony figures run in circles in place, kick up their heels and open their mouths as if they’re laughing.

“You’re just _feeding_ it, assholes!” Jensen laughs.

The Russian helo blows out a whole firecracker load of stuff at once, like the finale of May Day in Red Square outside the damn Kremlin, and the diskie ship soaks it all up.   Tracer flares actually spiral round in circles to hit the diskie, and it just... eats them.

The ponies give themselves a vigorous shaking, like they’ve just taken a bath, and start trotting forward again.  The diskie ship turns in a leisurely banking maneuver and starts spinning its way slowly toward the Russian helo.  The ponies start laughing again.

The Russian helo quite suddenly swings around on its tail rotor and takes off back the way it came, heading south, away from Bagram. 

“Damn, they’re going a nice clip.  Didn’t know they could plow it up that fast.”  Pooch whistles.

The diskie ship pauses a moment, waggles in place--literally rocks from side to side, and the ponies all gather on the side facing Cougar and Jensen’s windows, and the figures wave forelegs at Pooch’s helo.  Then they start trotting around the disk, as before, spinning up faster.  The ship hums louder, until their bones ache with it inside the helo cabin.

Then the disk flattens so quickly into a dot that none of them can estimate its speed.

_Gone._

Jensen has his whole hand spread on the window.  “Bye, diskie ship, have a nice life,” he whispers, and he’s smiling.  Kneeling on a seat to do it, after crawling up without the use of his feet.  Then he turns around and uses those long arms to crawl off and lay down again.

Cougar turns and stares at Jensen, who is wiping his eyes with the knuckles of one hand, and typing madly on his laptop with the other.

“Don’t you see?  We didn’t kill it.  We fed it.  It could finally rebuild itself.” Jensen nods happily.

“Did you know it would?” Hetty asks sharply.

“No, that’s the thing--I thought-- it talked about wanting to die, it really thought it was going to die, it just wanted out of all the pain it was feeling, it wanted to _die--_ and how can you mistrust something that can talk in Pony symbols, I mean, you saw--” Jensen sniffles a little, looking happy.  “But I guess the fire was actually a kind of energy it could use.  Wow.  Just--wow.”

The radio jamming disappears.  Jensen spins through frequencies and they all hear Kensi yelling in long hoarse sentences as if she’s been trying to contact them for the whole chase sequence.  Hetty translates it.  She reports that the truck caravan drivers also saw some black helos like their Russian friend.  Those were hanging around near Chora, at enough distance it was impossible to tell what they were actually interested in.  They just hung there in place looking menacing, while the caravan trundled through town and turned onto the highway toward Bagram.  And then something must have happened, because they all just... left.  About the same time the pink diskie ship departed at high speed heading south, it seems, the other black helos turned around suddenly and left Chora at speed, heading north.  The Russians might have some base between Chora and the spot where they started harassing Pooch--an idea which may be worth mentioning in debrief, maybe.

“So what was wrong with your radio all this time?” Kensi demands in English.  Hastily, she switches back to Romanian.

It takes awhile for Hetty to explain events to date.

There are no shrieks of disbelief, no cusswords, no flat statements of sarcasm.  Kensi just asks a question.  Hetty translates it with a smile.  “Did you recognize all the ponies?”

Cougar smiles back.  He’s looking forward to their tango date, it will be interesting.  There’s a woman who is as hard-headed as her boss.  Hetty looks pleased, too.

“Yes--I might have missed a few, looking down at my laptop sometimes, but Cougar probably saw all of them--” Jensen says eagerly.

“I’ve seen all of these on tv.  I do not know the names of each one,” Cougar clarifies.

Kensi says something that makes Hetty chuckle. She translates it as, “Great, you get to look them up in some kind of pop culture tv reference.”

Jensen wiggles in place.  “Oh, I can pull down the actual shows, check on them that way, too, if we don’t have some kind of better reference sooner.  I mean, if it makes a difference--”

Hetty looks back at Cougar and smiles, tilts her head slightly toward Jensen.

Cougar rolls his eyes, which makes her smile.

Kensi says, right out in clear, “Jensen, you’re a big old Toon, you know that?”

“I’m just drawn that way!” Jensen quips back, making her crack up.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Technical note: I do not know helos like Pooch does, not even close. I need help just to understand the parts.  
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WdEWzqsfeHM&feature=share&list=PL6CECC2E56B68A2C3  
> I learned about swash plates in this awesome series about helicopters here.  
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MaB4k1SgfUg&feature=share&list=PL6CECC2E56B68A2C3
> 
> As it happens, a co-writer on another story came up with a reference to the Russian language known as mat. Basically, it's rude terminology you would not use at a quilting bee with your grandmother, or at tea with your great aunt, unless your great aunt has a history more like, oh, Natasha in Avengers. Or Hetty Lange in the Office of Special Projects, NCIS: LA. Since it's difficult for me to gauge an appropriate level of severity for Hetty's choice of phrasing, I haven't attempted it.  
> Websites that explain what words mean in mat will also warn the reader not to assume that phrases which sound ordinary in translation are okay to drop into ordinary conversation in Russian. The weight and seriousness of a particular phrase in mat do not carry over reliably into the same severity in another language.


	16. Campfire Stories

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Are you cleared to hear these kind of stories?  
> Dunno why I was surprised, it's not like Cougar hasn't been warning us about his taste in partners.  
> Cougar can get totally raunchy, but he doesn't _talk_ about it like the others do. And yeah, Cougar has to do the Walk of Shame sometimes too. No point in mooching along in last night's mess with your head down, though. He just grins, head up, and swaggers a little.

“You’re kidding,” Clay says that night, stirring campfire coals on a stretch of rutted dirt next to the AH76.  Other trucks have camped here before, there’s fire rings.  He hoists up furry black brows at Jensen, who is still talking.  Then his head turns slowly, inevitably, toward Cougar, who just nods tiredly. 

Bagram air traffic control was very snippy and the field was a mess, part of it under construction.  The base was on high alert, so they put Pooch through his paces on the security protocols.  Apparently vetting them meant the airbase’s CO called everybody in Virginia he had on speed-dial, not just CENTCOM.  It took Cougar chatting with four or five bird colonels to confirm that yes indeed, he really was the sniper lent out to them for some wet work on various ops in other theaters, and yeah, the Losers were still a thing, so any op they were on had priority.  Some of the colonels remembered the messy details pretty well, which impressed Cougar.

Between him and Hetty, they finally got the base CO to admit that nobody from Bagram was going to drive down to meet their convoy and pick up their troublesome truckload of chained-up ex-merc Russian guards.  Something about lack of consent from the local politicians down near Chora.  When Cougar glanced over at Hetty, brows lifted at this line of bullshit, she just shook her head and made a gesture with her finger on her throat to cut it off and get on to the next thing.  Namely, landing their helo before they ran out of enough gas to settle down in a controlled manner.

The tower eventually interrupted the questions, saying urgently, _please_ put that sorry leaking piece of aged shit down out of the airspace before it fell down right on the landing pad.  The helo was leaking various fluids pretty badly by then, including flammable ones.  There were emergency trucks, and foam, and evac ambulances to get the injured passengers out.  They didn’t want anybody’s help on that, so Pooch and Cougar hauled ass wrangling gear down.

Cougar wasn’t leaving his guns, his ammo, or their remaining few illegal Russian RP7s lying around to add to the fireworks if the fuel went up on a spark.  Navgas might be formulated not to burn except under specific pressure conditions, but nobody wanted to take chances.

Both Jensen and Hetty got looked over by the nice medics but both of them refused to go away in the ambulances.  Hetty also used a different name, one which matched her Romanian ID, and she appeared to have some sort of connection through the Naval Liaison Office on base which allowed her to defy the medics trying to haul her off.  And the pain?  Turned out to be major chest surgery of some kind done in Germany just before she got called back down to this area with her team.  Reminding her that the whole team wanted her back safely in hospital just made her wave it all off impatiently.  But she sweet-talked the medics into donating boxes of wound supplies for the injured folks back at the convoy.

Cougar didn’t envy Clay the reports that he and Roque were going to have to file to cover all of this.  The annoying thought of his own reports kept popping up in quieter moments.  As Roque always puts it, Cougar is a fucking _Sergeant_ now, he can use a computer with writing programs and everything, he’s supposed to be fuckin’ eddicated enough to write complete sentences about meeting strange interesting new people and shooting them.  Arguing that he doesn’t want to _meet_ them first before he shoots them--not if he has any choice about it--just got him some long-term additional CAPE last time he tried it.  Roque said he needed to do it anyway, build up some decent muscle on him.  Doing pushups with Roque’s boots digging into his back, bumping around on his ribs and shoulder blades, doesn’t strike him as a positive body-building experience. 

Reports have always been a touchy issue among the Losers.  Cougar is not looking forward to the creative editing.  Would he really have to put in the complete list of ponies frisking around on the pink diskie ship?  How far could he safely reduce the level of detail?  “An elliptical shadow (scale diagram with axes of ellipse appended) appeared above and to our rear, which the Russian helo (possible types identified in appended list) appeared to regard as a threat, and the hostile helicopter retreated very rapidly, pursued by the elliptical vessel at a greater speed (airspeeds estimated at _arbitrary figures borrowed from Pooch, probably both at ridiculously high_ knots per hour.)  He’ll have to endure the annoyed Pooch-lecture he’ll get on indicated airspeed vs. calibrated airspeed vs. equivalent airspeed vs. V speed, too.

That was another reason it took them so long to finish mission reports--they kept having to recheck each other’s estimates, timelines, terminology, and drawings.  This was not correct procedure and they all knew it.  They just politely failed to discuss it in Clay’s face, no matter what kind of cursing Roque did on his own trying to coordinate the mess.

Enforcing the strict separation of report writing by locking them up in separate rooms, early on, had caused Clay a great deal of agony dealing with the documents they produced for him.  It caused Roque even more pain reconciling the mess.  Cougar got blamed for the locks because he kept wandering around checking on the others.  He wasn’t talking, just looking in, finding them all just as irritable as he was.  Pretty silly, trying to confirm from each other’s reports on just the simplest things, basic _static_ stuff, such as where Cougar had been shooting from.  Apparently he’d levitated around by way of trees on the site that Cougar didn’t remember being there, or something.  Pooch’s cell phone pictures didn’t match any of Clay’s, and nobody could make out what Roque’s shots of green and brown blurs meant.

It was even harder to resolve afterward because the site had effectively disappeared during the process, bombed all to shit.  Well, like many of their mission targets ended up getting obliterated.  They really _needed_ Cougar for reports because the regular pictures he took through his scope camera were the only reliable site records.  This trip, all the clear shots had been taken at his blind above the village, trying to catch all the different individuals there, and a few autoshots while he or Clay had been busy loading the other gun. 

During this op, he should have good clear pix of the diskie ship, but no.  The camera was working fine.  During the landing and the fire among the pine trees, he should have got lots of evidence.  But no, only one of the pix showed the ship, just before they got to it.  The rest, all gray blotches, blurs, _nada,_ even those taken point-blank.  That made no sense.  The ship couldn’t have been shielding itself from all electromagnetic radiation, since they’d been able to see it in regular daylight with ordinary human eyesight, and that’s what the camera uses.  There was only a long erratic gray blur for the vid he’d taken of the Little Ponies rotating on the pink-skinned diskie ship.  Jensen said it looked like the camera’s flash drive disk had been demagnetized just on that stretch of storage, but it was fine for the village pix, which made no sense.  Jensen was fascinated with this trick, and wanted to play with the disk so much Cougar expects it will wander off into Jensen’s piles of junk and Pooch will toss it out with the rest, in disgust.

He was starting to wonder if tangible stuff, like those plumbing parts he’d seen strewn out for a quarter mile, were still there.  Was there any proof at all left in the burnt trees where the diskie ship fell?  Or was it all some hallucinatory hologram sci-fi projection thingie that wasn’t even tangible?  When he mentioned all that to Clay, he got the frowny-face that meant the reports were going to be even more of a problem this time than usual.

Oh yeah, and nobody at the Bagram air field bothered to debrief them.  Didn’t even check on them, after all the fuss about landing. Officer of the day on the airfield just signed off on their arrival and departure without sending down anybody besides the medics to check on them, as if he had other things on fire to worry about.  No questions.  Nothing about the op, or where these people had come from, or how the Losers happened to find them.  Nobody mentioned Max’s name.  Or Wade’s, either.  Not once.  Clay frowned more at hearing that.

But it might have been due to tricks by the other team.

Hetty’s word dropped in a few Naval ears got them a loaner bird to haul their asses back down to meet the caravan out a hundred miles from Chora.  Pooch checked over a nicely maintained ten-year-old civilian helo with four passenger seats, no special armor on it, but some nice instruments, newly installed GPS.  Cougar and his guns are still their only armament.  Pooch had been nervous about encountering the Russian helos again, but once in the air, there’d been no sign of them within the observable horizon.  That said nothing about the Russian ability to lurk at greater distances.

The report that Pooch’s flying was able to hold off a Russian Special Forces-style helo for an hour makes Clay chuckle.  He loves hearing that shit.  “Yeah, I agree, they must’ve wanted somebody alive.  Question is, who?”

Cougar just spreads his hands wide, and then he nods at Hetty, busy in the distance taking down notes as she talks with ex-prisoners at the next fire.

“Yeah, could be,” Clay agrees.

Then Cougar tilts his hatbrim in Jensen’s direction.

“Yeah, him too.  Okay, go on.”

The report that Cougar shot the heavy missile off the Russian helo makes him grin.  “Keep that up, you’ll end up in those case studies again,” Clay warns him, and Cougar scowls at him.  It just makes Clay laugh.

Later, after the first watch of the night got the perimeter sorted out and nearly everybody had gone to sleep in the trucks, Cougar and Pooch get Jensen’s feet cleaned up and rebandaged.  But by then the comm specialist is too tired to dig out his hoarded chocolate to share as he meant to.  Jensen falls asleep before they’ve even got the padding in his boots sorted out to protect the bandaging when he goes rampaging around in the wheelchair.  Pooch just grins evilly, when they’re done, and waves Cougar for his time off-watch.

That this involves prowling around a little and visiting Deeks and Kensie in their comfy nest of jackets and backpacks in a truck cab is just one of the perks of being a night owl, in Cougar’s opinion.  He’s always liked getting fucked while sprawled on top of a backpack full of bandoleers, which leaves the kind of bruises no gunloving soldier could mistake.  They’re a nice souvenir.

Kensie proves to be a fierce lover with a pocket full of condoms and lube, plenty of ideas on things she’d like to try out on them both, and what she’d like to see them do to each other, which is not a big surprise.  Neither is her ability to bang both men into slack, addle-pated exhaustion and still want a skilled hand to drive her through three more climaxes--apparently it’s been awhile for her, too.  He’s not even surprised to learn that she’s very European in her personal style and she doesn’t take the time to shave _anything,_ so she smells of beautiful, healthy, incredibly desirable woman.  What’s a delightful surprise is that she likes to cuddle through the whole thing, curled up close with them both, kissing everything she can touch, and so does Deeks.  They hang onto him, hug him tight, even when Cougar is howling his way through a hard climax.  The racket doesn’t seem to alarm them, or annoy them, or worry them; they grin at each other, like they just won some bet.  Cougar settles back happily into their arms, sated and totally relaxed and dreamless with his nose happily blitzed in their scents.

Waking up to blink at his watch for the time, and stretch and kiss them both in gratitude, is pretty nice too, no matter that they all have horrible breath and the cab reeks of latex and drying semen and hot woman-sex.  Deeks grabs him, wrestles down Cougar’s jeans and starts taking care of that morning wood as if he wouldn’t mind doing it every morning, while Kensi blinks at them, smiling.  She tucks Cougar’s hand up where it can do some good for her, too.  That does it for Cougar.  He’s louder about yowling on that one than he meant to be, and can’t help it. 

Wrecked all over again, Cougar zips up and finally crawls down out of the cab, pushes the door shut quietly, and endures the walk of shame up to Roque and Clay--and this time, Callen and Sam, too--sitting over food at the little fire they’ve kept going.

“You ever heard the girl _scream_ like that before?” Sam asks.

“Nope.  Never again.  Some things are just TMI, man.  But thanks for taking the edge off those two,” Callen says bluntly, and offers Cougar a mug.

Sam makes a squinchy lemon-face.

Clay and Roque start giggling like the hyenas they are.  But it’s real coffee, by God, and Cougar sighs in gratitude.  Nobody hears him over the laughing.  By now Sam and Callen are staring at the hyena twins, who will hurt themselves if they keep hiccuping like that.

“That wasn’t your girl,” Roque says, still gargling into his mug.

Always funny, finding out what will make a Spec Ops Marine make that  _Eeewwww! gross!_ face.

Clay is grinning too.  Well, he’s had a couple of cups of coffee already, clearly, and he’s awake, and happy to rib the hell out of anybody who’s not awake enough to defend themselves.  Especially somebody who’s been getting some.

When Sam stares at them, making that drawn-up prissy face, Clay just points at Cougar.  “Guilty as charged.”

“You are fucking _joking,”_ Callen says.

“Cougar.  For the scream, not all the jumping and climbing and fuck-you attitude.”

“Don’t forget the claws.  Kicks like a mofo too, just sayin’.”  Roque shakes his head.

It’s embarrassing, getting bragged on like that.

“You really--?” Sam says, making a one-side squinching face this time.

“Him,” Clay agrees, grinning at Cougar.  _You knew it’d be a problem when you did it, now it’s time to face the music._

Callen doesn’t blink when he stares at Cougar.

Cougar looks at them all innocently over the coffee mug.  _Who, me?_   But he knows he’s not going to bluff his way out of this one.  Not with Clay outing him.

“Shit no, that’s all him.  He wasn’t even _loud_ this time.  You should hear him going all out on a real banshee-sex booty call.”  Roque is still laughing.  “Clay, you remember that time in Oklahoma City?”

Clay is already coughing into his mug, waving his hand at Roque to tell it.  And they’re laughing again, just from the pained look on Cougar’s face before he tips down the hat brim to hide it.

“So there we were, stuck in the middle of Hick Town Stateside, way down in the Bible Belt, and Booty Boy here has nabbed three escapees from the local prom--my God, they start ‘em young down there-- and they hole up in his hotel rooms.  Hell, you heard him here?  That’s nothing.  This jerk can hit notes that’ll frighten a fuckin’ opera star.  This time, he goes off like an air raid siren in heat, and the sheriff thinks the fire alarm went off.  _He’s_ up in the penthouse with these two blonde prostitutes.  Sheriff comes boiling down the hotel stairs, runs fourteen flights with his suspenders flappin’, wow, dragging along these massive bazonga gals, blonde twins who do part-time work in boobie-porno films--” Roque makes hand gestures, because he is laughing too hard to keep talking.

Callen looks at Clay.  “And _you_ heard all this?”

Clay picks it up.  “Hard not to.  There I was, getting comfortable with Sheila, just getting going good that night, and boy she was _not_ pleased when I heard Cougar’s happy scream come echoing down the hall--you can tell he’s happy, he just keeps going on and on-- and then all this noise in the stairwell was coming right through the walls.  So I got jamming into my pants and running down there--” Clay added.

“So is _that_ why Sheila tried to lock you in the elevator with the stink bombs?  I mean, that set off all the fire sprinklers?” Roque demands.

“Oh no, she was pissed off at me before that.  Totally teed off because I told her we were leaving in a coupla days, couldn’t tell her we gotta new deployment.  She brought in the stink bombs and the smoke bombs when she first came, but then she remembered she wasn’t _that_ mad at me, and we got into the bedroom before she ever got around to firing off the bombs.  While I was gone, she _remembered_ she was supposed to be mad at me, and when I try to come back upstairs in the elevator, boom--” he shrugs.

Roque casts a glance at Hetty’s team and shakes his head.  “Clay’s girlfriends, man.  Crazier than a hot skillet full of potato bugs.”

“Yum, protein!” Sam says dryly.

Callen is grinning.  “So, hey, Sam, remind me never to stay in the same hotel with these clowns.”  His gaze swivels from Roque back to Clay.  “Or the same zipcode.”

“The blond twins were cute,” Clay says, reminiscently.

“Oh, they just tried to hit you over the head with a couple of beer bottles and rob your sorry pantsless ass,” Roque says crossly.  “We’re not just talking pink boy here, we’re talking a butt so white you could play strobe for a disco, man.  And you got working on the bazonga twins on the _same night,_ man.  You weren’t even _sorry_ when Sheila came _back_ and started screaming at you _and_ the fire marshal in front of the whole department.  I mean, until the Sheriff arrested her for setting off the bombs and then the fire marshall started screaming what it’d cost him to cover her bail--”

Sam points at Roque.  “Let me guess.  Sheila was the fire marshal’s wife.”

“Ex,” Cougar says, and they all look at him.  He shrugs, nods at Clay. “Before--”

“Didn’t you _warn_ Clay she was batshit?” Sam demands.

 Cougar frowns.  “Oh, he knew.  She tried to stab me outside the men’s room the night after we hooked up--”  he coughs.  “Anyway, Clay talked her down, that’s how they met--”

Callen just stares at Roque in a rather accusing manner.

Roque just points back, and grins.  It looks like a mouth full of knives, that grin.  “See?”

Clay clears his throat.  “Sheila said the affair with me was just a minor point in their marital difficulties, honestly, but it’s a pretty small town, come right down to it--” Clay says it extra-pompously, and everybody just gives him a look.

Then they look at Cougar. 

“Busy night,” Cougar says.  He scratches his chin a moment, and decides it’s not his place to discuss the next bit.  That’s telling on the ladies, which would be ungentlemanly.  He tips the hat up, flicks a look to defer to Clay, who just shakes his head sadly.

Roque snorts.  “Sheila screaming out the goods, that’s how we found out our base CO there is also a volunteer fireman.  When Super Dooper Sneakyman here gave one of the prom queens his _uniform_ _blouse_ to cover her being nekkid as a jaybird in front of all those firemen, then the CO notices her friend is pretty damn near nekked too, and hey, turns out this friend was his _daughter_ standing there with joyjuice all over her frillies--”  He makes flippy silly finger gestures at one hip.

Clay growls, “Painful, when a woman _en flagrante_ is his daughter instead of just the sex thing.  Daughters of his friends, his neighbors.”

Cougar nods.  “I have sisters.  It would be bad.”

Roque sits back on his rock and drawls, “Yeah, and he didn’t much like you comparing the man’s daughter to the twin boobie whores, did he?”

“He should have treated the twins better,” Cougar says coolly.

“Yeah, you and your damn chivalry, asshole, which is how Clay ended up taking _them_ in, somehow or other--” Roque glares at Clay.

“It was their idea!” Clay says.

“Yeah, because they knew you were the only one left with any money,” Roque growls.

Callen shakes his head in disbelief.  “I’d hate to hear the kitchen table talks.”

“You mean the hungover talks?” Sam says.

Roque snorts.  “Yeah, you and me both.  So, here’s our base CO, pretty mad finding out his daughter left the prom early and decided she and her besties wanted some real sex ed from Sir Jerkalot here.  Classic.  Oh, loooookit, nobody will know, it’s a one-night stand, he’s gonna leave, nobody ever needs to know, oooooh baby, talk some more Spanish at me.”

Cougar tilts the hat, shrugs.  They’re happy, he’s happy, and so long as he’s careful what he does, it’s nobody else’s business.  Or shouldn’t be, even for small-town clowns.

Sam starts to laugh.  “One-horse towns, man oh man, do I remember what that’s like.”

Roque nods.  “Just another sad little moment of truth that had us in disciplinary meetings for oh, what was it supposed to be, two weeks?  But then Command just _had_ to send us to that fucking hole down in not-quite-Somalia-maybe, no equipment, no comm tech, no languages, no water tanks, just a coupla teenage militia guys as guides with a broken-down Jeep with this fucking Korean War-era bazooka mounted on the tail end, cause all they do is run away from things--”

“So Command was kinda pissed at _all_ of you? Not just kicking the horny little butt of your really, really loud sniper?” Callen says mildly.

“Yeah, but only because Clay took the heat for it, ijjiot that he is,” Roque growls, and smacks Clay on the shoulder.  “Because he is just that nice a guy.  _Ijjiot.”_  

Clay gives that goofy look of his, that shrug.  It never appeases his crazy girlfriends either.  Clay Franklin, yes, that’s really your effing CO, giving that dopey grin.

Annoyed, Roque twirls one of his bigger knives, and glares up at Cougar, who makes an apologetic wave of his hands.  He’s always going to be blamed for that deployment, and he knows it.  Roque gets blamed for his own bunch of deployments, and so does Pooch, so that’s fair.  Clay deserves the heat for _all_ of the deployments, over and above their individual fuckups, and that’s totally fair too.  Damned Clay and all his crazy Superman ideas of what his team can actually pull off in _reality,_ which don’t begin to match all the twinkly Christmas tree lights in his head.

Clay rakes his fingers through his hair.  “Hell, _I_ can’t help it if the base commander’s girls all like to pull soldiers off the mechanical bull in that bar and buy them waaay too many drinks until their pants fall down.  And pictures.  The girlfriends have these phones, right?”

“Still do,” Roque says glumly.  “Gawd, the horrible blackmail _pictures.”_

“Never saw Cougar move so fast as when that Sheila gal pulled a knife on him, but somehow, oh boy, they had pictures of it,” Clay says, like it’s a fond memory.

Cougar grunts, not appreciating it at all.

Sam’s chuckling as if he knows this scenario.  “Roque, didn’t one of your buddies in the ATF get posted somewhere down there, right?”

“Yeah, but he’s smarter than our ijjiots, and his wife is even worse than Pooch’s gal Jolene.”

“Don’t tell me.  He’s a big guy like me, his pants don’t fall down so easy,” Sam says sadly.

They laugh.  “Not like Cougar here.  Hey, Cougs, you’re still too fucking skinny, you’re gonna end up on a custom Roque-style weightlifting routine if you don’t eat better, you know that, right?” Clay says mildly.

At Callen’s glance, Cougar makes a face.  “Old school.  Raw eggs and climbing bleachers.”

“Yeah, and it works.  Anyway, it doesn’t take much for his pants to fall off,” Roque says.

“Chocolate?” Callen says, straight-faced.

“That’ll work.  Got candy?  Hey, whoosh, those jeans fall _right_ off.”

At the looks they give him, Cougar makes a sad face and spreads his hands out helplessly.  Truly, it does not take much.  Especially not when the girls in question tell him they want to do things that will make him extremely happy to accommodate their every request.   Sometimes it’s handy being able to suck in his gut and let the pants fall down on their own.

Indiscretions under DADT could get all of them shitcanned, so he doesn’t mention that _guys_ don’t have to _offer_ him anything.  Not when he’s in the mood for a little manhandling like today’s has been.  He’s pretty sure the Losers all knew that even before all his fun medical experiences in Lagos, but nobody’s ever asked him about the cray-cray that went down in Nigeria.  It just... changed their expectations of what he could pull off.  When they need a contact worked, they just tell him to go work his hoodoo on whoever in a bar, no matter _who_ the target is. 

“Chocolate, huh?” Sam says.

Callen nods.

“You’ve been talking to Jensen, haven’t you?” Clay says to the guys on Hetty’s team, who are still looking at Cougar.

Cougar shrugs, sticks one hand under his shirt tail and scratches his belly idly.  He stops doing that when they all look at his hands.  They’re thinking about what he’s been doing with them.  He sticks them in his pockets.  This is a bit of defiance that Roque won’t be happy with.  You’re not supposed to stick your hands in your pockets when you’re in uniform.

But he’s not in uniform. Technically, he’s not even at work in this fucking dustbowl.  He can stick his hands wherever he wants, and if that happens to be touching Kensi’s warm furry pettable wonderful human-nurturing bits-- or Deek’s sleek tight surfin’-hardened ass-- well, never mind, don’t think about that, start hoisting that flagpole and everybody will know what you’re thinking.  Bad idea.  Clay starts giving that crooked grin anyway.  Clay reads minds just fine.

“It’s not like we didn’t know it anyway,” Callen says.

Clay hoists a questioning eyebrow.  So does Cougar.

“Dude,” Callen says to Cougar, “there’s old marks from condom packets faded into your back pockets on _both sides.”_

Sam frowns.  “So what?  That doesn’t mean they ever get _used.”_

Callen looks at his partner.  “That’s-- wow, buddy, that’s even _more_ messed up.”

“Marines,” Sam says, with a shrug, and everybody just nods.

Cougar has to cover his mouth and pretend to cough, instead of laughing.

“So they do get used?” Callen says dryly.

“Understatement,” Clay says.

“Really,” Callen says, like he just can’t leave it alone.

Cougar slants one sarcastic brow upward.  He doesn’t have to say it:  _That would be telling._

Callen starts to chuckle.  “Right, you let Hetty know you’re coming for a visit, we’ll lay in a good supply of _chocolate.”_

“It’s nice when you have your team’s welfare at heart,” Clay says, just as poker-faced.

Sam snorts.  “Yeah, the good stuff.  Just so folks don’t have to... worry.  We got Jensen taped, now he’s not a picky dude, any kind of sugar makes him happy.  Any special requests on the kind of chocolate Mister Sniperdude likes?”

Cougar shakes his head.  He just looks at Sam, and then at Callen, and he smiles.  He doesn’t have to say that, either.  _Any time you like._

Clay gives a cough.  “Cougar is... flexible on a lot of things.”

 _“Adaptable,_ that’s the word you used last time Command was talking about some of their wackier ideas.  Oh yeah, except that one time when they wanted us undercover to play sex traffickers importing kids from places like, oh, Poland,” Roque says.

Cougar slants him a look.  He finally knows where this is going.  This is about marking him as unavailable to Hetty’s recruitment, or unsuitable.  Claiming him.  Mark him with some kind of warning stripe like a skunk.  _He’s our manslut bisexual wacko sniper who yells like the fiends of Hell, he’s so crazy we know you can’t handle him back in civvie-land._

Clay glances sideways at Roque, but he doesn’t cut it off, either.

God knows there’s plenty of stories they could tell about Cougar.  Hell, there’s stories about anyone on the team that would see Hetty close their files with a bang.  In spite of feeling sure that Hetty would get them all killed, he still wishes he could go retire to that kind of team.  Go live stateside, sit watching melodramatic telenovelas and cook on the weekends with Kensi and Deeks.  He’s conflicted, unsure whether to fight for that place on Hetty’s team, or just... let that offer pass by, let Roque slam that the door right in his face.  He could even help out Roque on this one, play up the crazy and make sure that offer gets shut down for all of them, including Jensen.

Poised, watching, he decides that giving Callen and his guys the iron truth is the only possible answer.  If he’s too much risk for Hetty’s team, then being strictly honest allows them to decide that for themselves.  He owes Deeks and Kensi that much affection at least.

Roque waves at Cougar.  “This asshole won’t let anybody beat up his women, not for the cover, not to build anybody’s story, not happening, zero tolerance, not a hint before he does something about it, not playing at it.  He’s worse about somebody mauling kids.  I didn’t even know you _could_ take somebody’s head off like that.”

Clay makes that face that means he remembers it just fine.  He aims a warning glance at Callen-- _Skip it, you don’t want to know how he did it._

“Learn something every day,” Cougar says dryly.

Sam and Callen both have that pinch-mark between their brows, but it’s the truth.

It was a learning experience for him, too--being made aware in one sharp cordite-stinking day in a Brazilian warehouse that his tolerance was that low, his limits that rigid.  He didn’t care where his responsibilities had come from, whoever he was protecting, he didn’t care what their color or tribe or language might be. _Protect and defend._   They were _his._ No _hijo de puta_ was harming those under his protection.  Call it ego maybe, but the test hit him that way every time.  And yeah, if Hetty tried to recruit him, she’d need to know that too.

Trust Roque to use the bloody truth for this.

Roque snorts.  “Yeah, you can ask him to play acrobat screwing the entire court of Monaco six ways in the chandeliers with professional photographers, or shoot out the lights, but don’t ask him to stand by while some piddling one-eye neighborhood pimp is picking out kids’ pictures to fit his regulars.  He’ll blow up that op every time, you better believe it.”

Cougar smiles crookedly, meeting their gaze.  _I’m still not sorry._

“Right,” Callen says.  “Hard limits.  We get it.”

“Good,”  Clay says.  “Here’s another one.  The guys locked up in our truck there got Cougar pissed enough to use the slingshot, so they used up his mercy shot.  Cougar catches those ex-guards getting loose, beating on each other or attacking anybody, he’s going to neutralize them. Center mass.  No warning, no leg shot, no second chance.  It’s reflexes by that point.”

Sam nods solemnly.  He follows that logic.  They all know, just from how Sam moves and talks, that he was Spec Ops, Marines.  Just as he knows what Cougar is, what Roque is.  Nobody’s quite as sure about Callen, but that just means he’s been a spook for some time.  They’ve already seen the proof that Hetty’s team are all pretty good at hunting humans.

Clay adds, “He could shoot them all and he won’t say he regretted it at the court martial.  He won’t regret it.”

“Ahh,” Sam says, “But you’re never going to let it _get_ to a courts martial.  Cougar’s _your_ sociopath.”

“They all are,” Clay says, with a strange, distant look on his face. 

Roque snorts, drawing his gaze.

They aren’t, actually, even close to it.  Just watch Roque talk about puppies, man.  Callen knows that, too, because they just told him that Cougar had blown an entire op for the sake of women and children. How is a spook team ever going to tolerate that?   Talk about soppy sorry foolishness.

But that doesn’t mean the Losers will ever be normal civilians, either.

Clay knows damn well that the big scarred man sitting next to him would, if he ordered it, go and blow up that truck with all the guards chained inside it, kill all of them horribly.  Then Roque would fight with Clay whether the sitrep justified it for pragmatic reasons, for the bad press it might get, for the failure to deliver guys loaded with possible intel to answer all the damn questions about Max’s operation here.  They might argue about it for years.  But Roque wouldn’t regret it either.  Blowing up people is his job too, not just installations or vehicles--in spite of how much he enjoys a good exploding chassis rolling up ten feet in the air.

“I thought Pooch was the sane one,” Callen says.

“No,” Clay says.  “No, not really.  Not when you see him doing his thing, piloting.”

Roque huffs a chuckle.  “Specially on this trip.  Hetty saw what she’s got to look forward to today, that’s for sure.”  At their fierce looks, he holds up a hand, chuckling.  “He’ll get everybody there, that’s his deal.  But we don’t guarantee they’ll _enjoy_ it much.”

Cougar groans, waving one hand, and they laugh at him.


	17. Caltrops are for Losers

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> C'mon, you knew it wasn't gonna be that easy, right? This is the Losers.

Cougar crouches down without touching his knee to the cracked paving, lets his gaze wander over the underside of the truck chassis, over the tires, over the half-melted slabs of rubber stuck everywhere.  They’re all decent at ordinary tracking, but he’s the one who grew up hunting feral hogs and peccaries and jackrabbits and deer to feed the family.  Sniper school honed nicely on his ability to see irregularities.

He reaches in under the chassis, tugs a piece of mashed brass out of the blown tire.  He holds it up in front of Clay, disgusted.  “Caltrop.”

“Yeah, you totally called it,” Clay agrees, taking it, and shoving it in his jacket pocket.  “Fuck, who the hell puts out caltrops across a highway this busy?  Had to be tossed in for a good mile with that rock fall, we’d have seen them otherwise.”

Cougar grunts.  Even Pooch said the rock fall looked recent, and therefore suspicious.

“Wade,” says Roque, disgusted.  “The more mess the better, that’s his style.”

“And it’s not ours?  I thought we had dibs on that style,” Pooch says into the comm.

“No, our style is to blow shit the fuck _up_ with some control, a little style to it.  Not blast out the entire city fucking block,” Roque says.

In their ears, Jensen chuckles.  “Honey badger don’t care, honey badger just throws down caltrops whenever he wants to!”

“Fuck your internet shit, it’s Wade who don’t give a shit who gets blown off the road.”  Roque stomps off.  “We ain’t forgot his stunts from last time, Clay.”

Clay rolls his eyes.  “That was five years ago!”

“Fucking lucky it wasn’t IEDs,” Roque yells back over his shoulder.

“It could be,” Cougar says.  He nods toward the road.

“Like, planting them right where we limp into the next gas station,”  Clay says, squinting into the distance.  “Jensen, you better let somebody know--”

“On it, bossman.  Telling the local detachment to get a squad out there to check it.  Don’t need any more collateral damage, no sirree--” and he’s humming something about a plastic paradise by the Gorillaz, a tune that Cougar recognizes but not those particular verses.  “Yes ma’am, we have reason to believe-- one of our informants tells us there may be IEDs planted along the 76 about one hundred twenty miles north of Chora--no, ma’am, as they were all underage, we did not detain them--”

Cougar snorts at the priceless look on Clay’s face, and starts working on unlocking the toolbox behind the cab.  One does not simply swap out spares by hand on a trailer this size.  One must get out the tools first.  To do that, one must unlock the toolbox.

He goes methodically through the ring of keys that Callen took off the dead driver.  There’s still spattered blood dried in the grooves on some of them.  Unsanitary, given the bad habits some of Wade’s former guards had with prostitutes.  There’s quite a few things like that which he really wishes he hadn’t overheard Hattie dictating to Jensen during downtime on the chopper ride.

“God, you’re such a fucking princess,” Roque says, dropping a sledgehammer into the dirt.  “Good, finally. Gimme that jack.  Yeah, the nuts are frozen on these bolts, Pooch, big surprise, why do you think I got out the damn hammer?”

 _“John Henry had a hammer--”_ Jensen starts singing into the comms in a respectable gospel-choir basso.  How the hell does he have a basso at his command when his speaking voice can squeal up there with the canaries?

“Fucking alien-- just shut the fuck up!” Roque bellows, and the hammer goes, _bang!_  and... nothing happens.  “Fuckin’ hell--”

“It’s gonna be awhile, huh?” Pooch says.

“Yeah, Pooch, get your bird upstairs, give us some eyes,” Clay says on the comm.

It ends up being Cougar kneeling down by the shredded tire, tapping gently, listening to the metal as closely as if it’s a tuning fork, who finally gets the crusted lugnuts to loosen off the bolts.  Penetrating oil would be faster, but what he’s _got_ is lube from condoms.  It’s one of the things he learned from working with Pooch when he’s bored.  Yeah, there were comments about him for that one.  But somehow it’s all _ordinary_ when Pooch does it.  Nobody ever comments on where Pooch learned it.  Nobody seems to notice the faded spots on the mechanic’s back pockets, not the way they look at Cougar’s ass.  Why the hell does everybody criticize the ass of Cougar’s pants?  Come to think, why are they even _looking_ at Cougar’s ass?  Roque is growling something in Russian about getting Cougar to suck the damn bolts to get their nuts off, it’d be faster.  Sometimes he worries about Roque, he really does.

“Makes me worry what the fuck the engines look like,” Pooch mutters, more than once.

“They look like crap, of course they do, but they’re Russian, so they run like crap too, but they always fuckin’ run--”

“Oh hell, Roque, stop jinxing us like that!” Pooch exclaims.

Which is when Callen’s truck engine gives an odd sputter, coughs, and gives a shrill fan-blade noise before it whines down into silence.  Then there’s ominous dripping noises.  They can all hear the echo of Callen swearing on the other comm line, echoing back into the second system via Jensen’s headset in the helo.

“You know, I remember working roadie on a band bus one summer, stuff breaking down just like this,” Pooch says.  “Hey, Jensen, don’t gimme that look, I was seventeen, I didn’t know any better.”

“Still don’t,” Roque growls.

“Hey, I hear you-- but it’s his _job,_ right?  Roque’s _on it._  Somebody’s gotta be the cranky older brother who just bitches everybody the hell out for being knuckleheads, right, Roque?” Jensen says cheerfully.

Roque’s reply is full of cusswords that aren’t English.  Something in Russian _mat_ about pulling down the spare.  Deeks and Hattie start laughing on the comm.  They have got to stop getting sent to places where people will understand them cussing things out in _mat._

Turns out there’s no point to swapping on this spare.  Cougar shakes his head over the bald, cracked treads, putting the rusty pressure gauge back in his pocket so he can go scrounging among the other spares on the other trucks.  They checked and filled these up before they left; meaningless when the spares aren’t holding the air pressure Pooch gave them just before departing.  It was a lot of work to do, too.  So much for maintenance by Wade’s crews.

Cougar sighs.  After fruitless checking on spares, he squats down to work on equally frozen bolts on Callen’s rearmost passenger-side trailer tire.  He pulls out another condom and starts rubbing lube into the nuts frozen on the bolts.

“So we swap out tires from Callen’s truck to this one,” Clay says, walking away toward the rear of the caravan.  “Deeks, you and Kenzie got our twelve?  Good, I got our six.  C’mon Roque, gimme an eye out for IEDs along here, leave it, let Cougar and Callen get the trucks sorted.”

Callen hoists up an eyebrow.  Oh, _he’s_ wise to Clay’s tricks, trying to peel Cougar away from Deeks and Kensi, aim him at Callen instead.  Callen leans back and gives Cougar’s ass a long, considering look.  Then Callen looks coolly over at Clay, nods once, and smiles.

Cougar tilts down the hat brim, annoyed.  Then he glances up and watches Callen swing down from the tailgate, unlatch the ramp and let ex-prisoners climb out of the trailer.

It would make more sense to have Cougar guard the caravan’s rear, gun-scope ready, but they all know when Roque needs to go take a walk and let off steam.  Roque’s taken his comm off, the muttering fades as he strides away.  God help anybody who shows up behind them, innocent civie or bad guy alike.

“Man’s got a temper.  Shit for spares on all of them?”  Callen asks.

Cougar nods, moves aside to another tire, lets Callen start working the jack to lift the trailer.  Then there’s murmurs, and some of the stronger ex-prisoners are gathering around Callen, and making gestures.  They offer to work on swapping around tires while the soldiers are guarding the convoy.  They seem to be very clear on the idea that many hands make light work, and that the caravan better have more trained eyes on guard duty.  Somebody might want to stop their prison-break.

They’re right, too.

Figures, that Wade would come in with a nice spanking new Spec Ops-hardened chopper of his own, armed to the fucking teeth.  He’s just that kind of guy.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Jensen's reference to honey badgers comes from an Internet caption on various pictures of animals and other ridiculous pictures. (I don't think it's technically a meme, since it doesn't involve answering surveys or questions by individuals...) I haven't checked for the provenance and history of this pop trivia. So this quote may be anachronistic, if you count that the movie was done in 2010, or maybe it's a sign of a really haywire AU where things are quite scrambled in other ways. I think it's pretty clear in other references that haywire AU is a good option...


	18. Why You don't Want Jensen to Improvise

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Of course Cougar is all OCD about his guns, that's a touchy point of pride in his performance.  
> But trying to keep his team safe is going to be tough when Jensen apparently thinks that's just become _his_ job.

“How come the bad guys always have endless legions of mindless recruits and all the baddest guns and the screaming flaming ghost horses and badass Nazgul helmets and shit?”

 _“Shuuuuuddduuuup,”_ Roque growls.

Something blows up, something else whistles by the trucks, something stitches along the ground in lazy little tracks, _dit-dit-dit._ Silly marks, not looking nearly as serious as it really is.

“I know, I know, the conventional argument goes that bad guys have more money because they’re willing to do unethical things and stoop to lower depths and deal in bad drugs and defraud people-- and by all accounts this can actually work as a way of making buckets of money, I mean, I have read up on the banking failures--”

“Fucking _alien.”_

“You ever tried wearing one of those Nazgul-type helmets?  Straight-up, try out a German 14th Century number, all spiky and intimidating and fancy inlay.  Heavy.  No field of vision to speak of, lousy hearing, might as well put a canning pot on your head.  And I gotta tell you, a pot spins like a mofo when some jerk shoots it, no lie.”

“Yeah, that’s just dumbass,” Pooch agrees.  Hetty is in the chopper with Jensen and Pooch, she seems to be counting time while they’re doing some sort of test-run over the other side of the hills, where Wade’s helo hasn’t noticed them, or dismissed them as cowards, or discounted them as a problem, or something.  Nothing else Pooch has tried so far has distracted Wade’s helo from going after those damn strafing runs on the trucks.  However, Pooch did provoke the jerks into shooting off almost all of their rockets, which was nice.

Turns out Jensen is pretty good at shooting heat-seaking intercept missiles closing in on the tail of Pooch’s helo.  He was shooting Cougar’s heavier gun, while sitting in that wheelchair at the open cabin door.  He claims the chair makes him a better shot, stabilizes his aim.

Roque may be right about Jensen being an alien.  _Nobody_ has the speed to lead a target that jinks like that.  Even if it flew perfectly straight, Cougar is not sure he could shoot heat-seeking missiles coming at him that fast, right out of the sun.  Jensen gives credit to his crazy cracked glasses, with polarized lenses, but he’s still pleased at Clay’s praise.

“I _do not want to know_ how you know what it’s like to put a canning pot on your head,” Clay says now.  If he flinches when the next spatter of bullets starts stitching up the dirt right toward his position under the back of the cab, nobody but Cougar notices it.  It’s coming up at Cougar’s position too, so nobody’s pointing fingers and calling names here.  It takes him awhile to notice that the airborne chatter on the comm is not making sense.

“Aaaand we have blue dust on the hillside--so that’s touchdown in eight,” Jensen says.

“So you got the numbers?” Pooch says.

“Yeah, I make it out four seconds we drop it after they pull up over that clump of rocks at the edge of the bluff.  Hit ‘em too soon, and their bird will roll back downslope on the other side of the ridge, roll right down onto our trucks.  We want to hit them later so they fall away on _this_ side, roll onto this slope.”

“Got it.”

“Choogling chumbucket charnel-chunkers,” Clay says, on his elbows behind a tire, shooting his dumbass sidearm into the cowling of the strafing helo barrelling down at them.  There’s plenty of time to notice that the ammo is all bouncing off, too light a shell for the job, and Wade knows it.  He’s perfectly visible, standing coolly upright just inside the cockpit, pointing forward past the pilot at something. Normally the cowling would be solid black, but apparently this special job has got that electrical glass shading with adjustable degrees of transparent, and Wade is showing off, grinning down at them like they’re fish in a barrel.

“GIve it five to six seconds to be sure,” Hetty says.

“Choogling?  Really?  What the hell is choogling?” Pooch says.

“Don’t ask,” Roque growls.  “Just don’t.  Don’t set off that fucking _alien--”_

Too late.  Jensen is happily off and running, yattering about Fogarty songs written twenty, thirty years before he was even born.  Cougar loses some of the conversation in the echo and racket of small caliber bullets bouncing in ricochets around the trailers.  Some of the bullets go right through the trailers.  Strafing runs, no shit.  The evol chopper must have used most of their grenades somewhere else first, because they only had a couple dozen to blast the site here, most of them shot to halt the trucks. These tracer rounds now bounce off everything, they’re so light they ricochet. 

He hates those movies showing strafing runs by aircraft.  He pretty much hates the whole idea.  He got mad enough at this damn strafing helo to jump out of cover just after they roared past him, he braced out in the clear with his light rifle and he shot their tail rotor until his mag ran out.  They were low enough to be in range, so two, three good shots into it, and Wade should’ve had some new aerodynamic problems to think about.  Have some _Failure of Tail Efficiency_ to work on, asshole.

But there’s no sign of it just then, dammit.

He’d have jammed in another mag and kept going, except Sam ran out and sacked his ass like Cougar was some puny little high school quarterback and dragged him squawking under the shelter of a leaking truck engine block with a crowd of other folks.  Which, annoyingly, turned out to be a good thing.  Wade’s helo swung around smartly to come back after him.

But by God if Wade’s chopper pilot didn’t start doing LTE compensation maneuvers, finally, betraying there’s damage taken.  Cougar has impaired their stability in the air, but not enough to _stop_ them at their damn strafing.

He glares at Sam, who just grins.  “Damn, Cougar, you got sharp elbows.  Quit kicking!”

Pooch crows in delight.  “What?  Are you guys _making out_ down there while Wade tries to shoot your sorry butts?  I mean, you gotta give Cougs credit, but really, not the time, guys--” Pooch is _laughing_ at them on the comm.

Cougar rolls his eyes, and Sam pats him really hard on the shoulder--ouch!--and pushes his big blocky self closer, shoving everyone into better cover, slamming Cougar over into everybody else cowering under the engine block.  Oil and water is drizzling down Cougar’s back.  As he watches, something goes _spang!_ and another leak gushes from the radiator.  Fuel lines will leak on him eventually.  At least diesel doesn’t explode so easily, it’s not like laying under a tank of regular gasoline.  Something like an RPG-7 or a rocket might build enough pressure and heat to set off diesel, but they will have to work harder at it.  He twists around and looks at Callen, on the other side.  Oh yeah, he’s been in those firefights too, crazy man.

Jensen is saying, “Lalalaaa, I did not hear that-- so anyway, tell me Poochman, why do the bad guys get all the cool toys?”

“Because the bad guys as written are so damn stupid they need all the advantages they can get to overcome our heroes, who at least try to keep a few more brain cells going to rub together?” Pooch says.  “I mean, MacGyver.  Duct tape.  Just saying.”

“You guys could help out any time now,” Roque growls.

“Keep your bikini butt-floss tied, Princess.  Y’all need some duct tape, let me know.”

Roque is just growling by then.

“Got that coil ready?” Pooch says, in his lazy West Virginia drawl medevac voice.

“Yep,” Jensen says, laughing a little.  “There they go, strafing now.  Pull-up in ten, nine, eight--”

“Drop on three,” Hetty says, and counts it off.

“What the hell?” Roque says, squinting from behind a shattered tire.

Pooch’s helo zooms up from behind the cover of the bluff and zips upward and then sideways like a bird flushed from cover.  Leaving, in its wake, an unrolling flipping bit of pale stuff that drifts outward into lazy curls as easy as a waft of smoke.

The coils start draping across the cowling of the other helo as it zooms toward Pooch’s bird, flying just above the deck with the rising ground.

Jensen’s crow of joy turns into words.  “And gentlemen, I give you... the planet Hoth, the Imperial walkers striding along in the snow, and a speeder with a bit of string attached.”

“Fuck,” Roque says, awed.

The coils of rope don’t even have time to completely uncoil.  That’s actually more effective, creating multiple tangles of line whipping around the helo’s rotors. 

Jensen natters on.  “If we had carbon nanofibers we’d be feeling more secure about our ability to discomfort the enemy, but as it is, Cougar’s backpack of ropes will do nicely, don’t you agree?”

The helo’s noise sputters, the tail assembly spins around the helo’s body four times, and then it sinks out of sight behind the bluff, leaving cut streamers of rope winding and fluttering briefly in the air above the bluff.

It crashes with a _boom!_ on the far side of the rise.  Even more horrible noises happen, smoke starts coming up, and there’s some more low, concussive boom noises.

“You like that, Roque?” Jensen asks.  “C’mon, tell me you liked that one.”

“Fuckin’ _alien,”_ Roque says, awed.

“Hardest part is figuring out how to make the ropes drift open enough in the air,” Pooch says.  “We had this one military research gig where we wanted to lay down a drift panel, some weird kinda solar-sensitive material, way up on a hillside, and this utility pilot, contractor with some of the emergency and firefighter guys, he was showing me how they lay down all kinds of light materials.  Hell, these guys could’ve dodged the ropes on a better day, but not after Cougar busted hell outta their tail.”

 _“Hoth,_ man.  You totally called it, pulling that idea out of thin air,” Jensen says. 

“Naw, it was your blather about Luke Skywalker working hopeless causes anyway.  I want me some emergency carbon nanofibers for this kinda shit, how’s that, hackerboy?  Wanna find out how many of them crawled out of the fire, or shall we let Roque and Cougar cowboy up?”

“Cougar needs to help Sam with the injured,” Clay says into his comm.  He’s already up, crossing between the trucks, carrying some old professorial sort, an ex-prisoner with a bullet wound in the leg, over to the trailer where Sam is jumping in to get their medical gear.  “Roque needs Callen’s backup to check on the prisoners in his trailer.  Pooch, take a look at the crash.  If you see anybody moving, run back here and we’ll load in somebody to help you round them up.”

Hetty’s voice says, “Don’t see anybody moving.  Swing round the other side.  I think there’s rocks where they could roll out and hide.”

 “Give me two minutes and Deeks and I can get our injured people moved for help.  Then we can jump on for Pooch’s aerial recon.” Kensi’s voice is deadly calm.

“You just like shooting back,” Deeks says.

“I did say _jump,_ ” Kensi says, like it’s a dare.

“I knew there was a reason Cougar liked you two,” Pooch says, amused.

“No movement so far,” Hetty says.  “The wreck will be too hot to check for bodies for a few hours.”

“Do you like how she just _knows_ that?” Roque says to Clay.  “Just like that.”

“Hot, isn’t it?” Clay says smugly.  Then he laughs at the look on Roque’s face.

Cougar looks up at Sam, who is pacing around the trailers, checking injuries as everybody is rolling out from under the trucks.  Sam comments on the comm, “Oh, Hetty’s great for diets, man.  Best thing ever is going to one of her forensics briefings.  Guarantee you will not be hungry.  For days, maybe.”

“I heard that,” Hetty says.

“The fly larvae are the _best,”_ Kensi says.

“Am I _ever again_ going to kiss this person who knows the grubs of every species of fly that infests the garbage cans in back of the office--” Deeks will be probably go on for awhile.

“And here I thought _your_ girlfriends were something else,” Roque growls at Clay.

“Sharpshooter, too,” Clay says, smiling.

Cougar winces.  He really, really wishes he hadn’t heard that from his CO.  He knows the kind of gals who really light up Clay’s happy meter, and nobody wants to see one of those get their hooks into Clay, it’s always a nasty ride.  He’d like to think Kensi is not like that.  She shouldn’t even be pinging on Clay’s radar, she’s a nice kid.

A nice kid who shoots people.  Really well.

Then he catches Sam staring at him, one eyebrow lifted silently.

Cougar meets that skeptical gaze, and gives a little shrug.  _Hey, I didn’t know._

Sam doesn’t give an inch. _You’d hit that if she was in a smock in a morgue cutting things up and waving a bone saw, swear to God._

Cougar shrugs again.  _What’s a morgue and some body parts, between friends?  You’re a medic too.  Tell me you didn’t have a crush on Scully in X-Files reruns in high school._

Sam rolls his eyes, shakes his head.  _It’s your funeral, man._

“So are you guys done with the ninja Special Forces mindreading thing?” Callen says.

Sam blinks at him.

“Yeah, like that,” Callen says.  “That’s why you two shouldn’t be on the same team.  You’d both run silent and then I’d have to talk to myself just to hear a human voice once in awhile.”

Sam is giving Callen the skeptical look now.  _Assuming you’re human._

The rest of it is a series of frowns, head shakes, grimaces, and a shrug, all of it completely opaque to Cougar.  Sam seems to be very amused when he glances at Cougar and catches the fact that the sniper wasn’t actually included.  Sam looks over at Callen fondly.  _Jealous byotch._

 _Stop giving me reason to be,_ Callen’s return gaze is saying.  _Sacking the hot TexMex sniper with the gun, dragging him off into cover when he’s a pro like yourself, what was that really about?_

Sam smiles a little.  _C’mon, gimme a break. Tell me you wouldn’t hit that like a big old steam-powered locomotive.  Yeah, you liked watching him jump out like a crazy thing and shoot that helo to shit._

Callen turns that intense cannon-bore gaze on Cougar instead.

Cougar holds up his hands, fingers spread wide.  _No harm no foul, man._

“We good?” Sam asks, patiently.

“Yeah,” Callen says, and it’s a whole lot more than agreeing it’s past time to get back to work.  “Later,” he says to Cougar, and it could be for anything from delivering a right verbal smackdown for lusting after Sam--as if anybody could help that-- to dumping Cougar’s body in some of those brushy canyons and making sure his gear would never be found, but also agreeing with Sam’s assessment of Cougar.  Yeah, the look says that Sam’s right.  Even to the point of gagging Cougar to keep him quiet for a whole lot of surprise buttsex in one of the truck cabs.  _Fucking those skinny foxes with stamina from hell, oh yeah. Invite him in and give Sam a halfway decent birthday present, for once._ As if Cougar is a toy wrapped up in a bow that he can give Sam, not something he wants for himself at all.

Cougar blinks at Callen walking away.  _What the hell was that?_

“Yeah, that’s just my man Callen, bein’ himself,” Sam says, as if he’d said it all out loud.

“Is he always that--”

“Yep,” Sam says.  “Always has been.  Survival trait, man.  And always pack the lube, you just might get lucky.  Besides, Hetty keeps us running so hard we better snag the rare chance we ever get time.  But not right now, sorry.  Now we got some folks need some new bandages, dammit.”  He actually chuckles at the startled look on Cougar’s face, smacks him on the shoulder again, and walks away.  _Ouch._

“It’s never right now,” Cougar says, which makes Sam laugh harder.

He didn’t recall making any kind of offer, but it’s not like he’d turn them down.  Ouch, _ouch._   Cougar thinks he might need aspirin and arnica gel to cope with the bruises, if he’s going to hang out with Hetty’s team for a few more days.

He’s rechecking old bandages on patients when Jensen wheels up in a crunch of gravel.  The chatter leads far ahead of him, like a cloud, before he’s even in sight around the corner of a trailer.  “So yeah, who would’ve expected this, huh?”

There’s something wrong, Cougar can hear that in the man’s tone.  Without moving the hat brim, just keeping his hands busy taping up a new bandage, he glances over at the hacker.  _Shit._

Wade is sprawled across Jensen’s lap and the arms of the wheelchair, one leg dragging a bit, both hands braced on his shiny new gun with the muzzle up under Jensen’s chin.  Red is drooling out of Wade’s mouth and down from some holes in his shirt and dripping off his belt.  His head wobbles a bit with every bump and jiggle of the chair, he’s dripping red on the dirt rutted between the trucks.  Jensen is closer to getting shot with an accidental twitch of Wade’s hand than on purpose.

Cougar’s hands keep moving on the bandages.  He stills the nervous woman he’s working on with a hushing gesture, touching her arm briefly.  She’s sitting on a chair between the trucks so there is no clear line of sight from the helo where Pooch set down on the roadside.  Nobody else has seen them.

“Come on,” Wade growls, and jabs Jensen a bit harder with the muzzle, using both hands just to keep it in place.

Cougar ignores him, keeps moving as if he hasn’t noticed any of it.  He starts talking to the patient in front of him, telling her in his basic Russian what she needs to do to clean her wounds later.  Her eyes are enormous, and her shakiness could pass for pain or shock from the bandaging, so he just smiles at her and pats her arm.  He’s pretty sure either she’ll imprint every last word he told her, forever, or she’ll remember nothing.

His right hand dips into the first aid box and pulls up another sterile pad.  He turns his body so it doesn’t show when his left hand dips into his jacket pocket.  One hand slides past the other under cover of the pad, and then his arm has come up with the rubber of the slingshot stretched taut. 

Jensen has already jerked wide of the gun muzzle, throwing himself backward and to his left, and Wade is flying up in the air, legs flapping.  There is all the time in the world to track the movement of Wade’s center mass and put a succession of three pebbles into Wade, at the forward elbow, at his ribs, and at one thigh.

Wade lands awkwardly, rolling over one shoulder and flopping like a puppet, but his head doesn’t crack open and he doesn’t have his gun any more and he’s not going to be moving much for awhile.

Jensen, on the other hand, is lying crookedly on his side with his legs hung up in the chair, which has fallen somehow upside down.  He waves a little.  “Fine,” he says.  “I’m fine, thanks, if anybody was asking.”

Cougar growls, but by then he’s too busy working on Wade and Wade’s fucking damn injuries to keep him alive, trying to make sure he doesn’t get away again.

When he looks up, Jensen grins and offers some of Pooch’s zipties from a pocket stuffed with all kinds of other junk too.  A couple of cat’s-eye marbles roll away in the dust.  Bits of wire, string, sure.  But a crumpled paper airplane and jacks?

“Random number generator that’s not electronic,” Jensen explains happily.

Cougar growls at him.  “No singing.”

“Okay, okay, I’m good, I got it, don’t piss off the medic,” Jensen agrees.

Cougar glares at him, goes back to the woman who was his patient originally, he assures her the danger is over, and hands her off to Sam.

“You could’ve warned me, Clay,” he growls into his mike.

“Yeah, and make the asshole nervous.  Too close, he could hear the chatter on Jensen’s earpiece.”

Cougar says a few things about that in Spanish.  Mildly, politely, under the circumstances.

“Hey, you were gonna get the best line of sight on him,” Roque says.

Cougar disentangles Jensen’s boots from the chair, turns the thing right side up, and nods at Sam, and between them they hoist Jensen by his arms back in place.  Jensen’s glasses are crooked and covered in smudges and dust.  Very gently Sam takes them off Jensen’s face, hands them to Cougar, and says, “You saw where that asshole was hiding and you played bait to pick him out, didn’t you?”

Jensen blinks up, squints.  “What?”

“You did,” Sam says, and shakes his head.  “Man, are you gonna get it.”

Jensen squints up at him, and then over at Cougar, and back at Sam.  “Umm, he needed help, you know, and by the time anybody else went trying to crawl in those rocks after him--I mean, we really needed to get him to medical attention right away if we were gonna get any questions answered, right?”

Pooch sighs on the comm.  “Shit, all I need, trying to get somebody to let us land up at Bagram, again and offload that shithead on ‘em.”

Clay snorts.  “I think we can finally guarantee that somebody will swing by here to pick up our current prisoners, what’s left of them.”

“You mean, come make excuses and take Wade off to a nice clean place stateside to recuperate so Max can put him back to work again,” Cullen says, standing by Sam, looking down at their latest prisoner.  He adjusts the fingers of one glove in a wonderfully creepy manner.

“So many questions, so little time,” Cougar growls.

Cullen just smiles at him.  “Ain’t it always?”

Cougar holds up the wiped glasses, inspects them.  Then Cougar leans in close, looking at Jensen’s eyes, checking pupil dilation in the bright light.  Jensen’s hands are already starting to shake--just plain old adrenaline reaction, nothing special, but he’s not going to be able to do much for awhile.  Cougar threads the glasses back on Jensen’s ears for him.  Straightens them on his nose.  Then he leans in close, turns his head, murmurs right into Jensen’s ear.  It’s not private, but it’ll have to do.  “Later.”

Jensen does not look like he’s just received notice of a reward for his bravery and courage and innovative thinking and general take-charge initiative.

Good.

Jensen’s mouth makes a wobbly smile, and he squints up at Cougar and says, “Promise?  I saved you some chocolate, man.”

Cougar opens his mouth, and closes it, clamping his jaw shut, grinds down hard on making any noise.  He turns his head away, and he looks carefully at the trucks, at the rocks, at Wade, at Kensi and Deeks running up to them.   Then he looks at Jensen, right into those amazing sky blue eyes.  “Fuck yes,” he growls.  “Where’s your Peeps?”

 Jensen is stuttering when he answers, something about Cougar’s backpack on the helo.

Cougar stalks off, gets the damn squashed candy out of his backpack--of course it’s made a fucking mess of things in there--and grabs two bottles of water.  He drinks one and goes back to Jensen, and holds it so Jensen can drink from it, and then feeds two of the pathetic squashed bits of sugar into Jensen’s mouth.  Jensen is still stuttering, trying to say something.

Cougar tells him, “De nada.  Stop trying.  You can sing now.  Sing if you want to tell us something on the comm.  Right?”

Jensen nods.

Cougar feeds him two more candies, and makes Jensen drink more water.

When Deeks says something about  rechecking Jensen’s feet, Cougar just growls at him.  He’s got patients waiting who were _shot,_ he doesn’t need to give Jensen’s neglected feet attention right now.  It’s not like he’ll forget it needs doing.

“Right, right,” Deeks says, flinging his hands wide.  “Jeez, man, just take the whole ear off if you’re gonna snap like that.”

Kensi’s looking disapproving too.

Cougar glares at them both.

Jensen starts to stutter.

Cougar turns on him, bares his teeth, and holds a pointing forefinger.  He’s choking on wordless noise, struggling not to let out all those screaming hells clamped down in his chest.  Finally, on a little hiss of breath, he settles for a whisper. _“No more heroics.”_

Jensen nods, bobbing his head, and likewise holds up his hands, palms out.  “Promise.”

Cougar swings away, starts walking away blindly.  Cougar is still so pissed off he’s about to start screaming in rage.  Clay’s seen that a couple of times.  Nobody else has, yet.  But they’re all pushing their luck.

Cougar wants to go off scouting in the rocks, checking for any more ambushes, but they have others who can do that.  He needs to keep sewing up holes in people, clamp a lid on the stupid fear.  Any screaming fucking emo outburst will have to just wait until later.  He goes back to checking bandages on people who had enough problems before Wade’s goddamn strafing runs.  Maybe he moves a little faster and more decisively on treating the former guards than he might have done on another day, but he’s got more people to work on and less patience to do it with.  Sam doesn’t say much, he just moves patients around for him.

When one of those ex-guards who fancied himself a hero tried to grab Cougar’s sidearm, he puts the guy down screaming in a nerve pinch on the grabby hand which was maybe a little harder than it needed to be. 

The next guy, who tried to take a gun off Sam, Sam made pretty damn short work of with an ear grip.  Sam murmurs in Russian, then repeats in English.  “Yeah, let’s not get silly ideas the last few hours you’re here, right?”

“Tell it to Jensen,” Cougar growls.

“Oh, I think you got that well in hand.  I mean, much as you’re ever going to be able to manage that one.”

Cougar just growls at that.

“Love’s just cruel, it’s true,” Jensen starts singing in the comm.

Sam’s big hand comes down on Cougar’s shoulder.  “But man, you _will_ have your hands full.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hmmm, seems all the big cats are possessive about their food. Growling and spitting and everything.  
> Big Cat Rescue vids have a lot of fun stuff about the cats, details about the species, the odd noises they make, the way you have to handle them. You don't take food away from them!  
> http://youtu.be/t5s3VZLM6T0


	19. Amateurs

"So how did you first know Roque was a man with a big chip on his shoulder?" Pooch asks, grinning.

"More like sixteen four-by-fours," Jensen answers, putting down a pair of fours.

"Well, yeah, just a waterbowl short of an entire doghouse," Pooch agrees.

"For a mastiff maybe," Jensen says, raising Pooch a nickle, and then proudly laying down a pair of fives. He rakes in the pot, shuffles the deck, deals.

Pooch makes a disgusted face at Jensen. "You call that a hand? What is that?  That’s not a hand, that’s a foot, it is an elbow, it’s--"

"Now, Roque as a nasty badass, yeah, the scar on his face was a big clue, but I hate to make assumptions about a veteran officer who might just have run into an accidental encounter with a threshing machine or something-- did you hear that?"

"Naah, this whole house creaks like a really lousy old boat in the wind." Pooch lays down a pair of sevens, sweeps up the pot, starts doing flashy riffles and fans to shuffle the deck. "And I've been on some pretty leaky boats."

"I thought I heard something."

"Wind out here makes you jumpy, huh?"

"No, it's talking about Roque makes me jumpy. Just say his name and poof, like ol' Scratch, there he is," Jensen says.

"Oh, any old Louey is like that. More like, every time you leave the kitchen a mess, he gets on your case. You know he hates seeing how you treat his third-best set of knives. Better make sure you clean it all up nice before he gets back," Pooch warns him, dealing fresh cards.

Jensen grumbles. "Well, we don't have any others!"

"Well, you really aren't a knife kinda guy," Pooch says tolerantly.

"Got that right," Jensen agrees.

"But look at it this way, it's a useful skill, right? What's not to like in a guy who'll pull a KA-BAR on a shark and make it back down?"

"A guy who'll pull a gun on a shark so the whole problem just goes away!"

There's a ghost of a board creaking, and Pooch looks up, mouth open.

Jensen yelps at the big, big hand that drops down coolly on the nape of his neck, and the ice-cold steel that slides up under his ear, shaving off the finest of body hair on his skin as it goes.

Roque whispers into Jensen's ear, "Guns are for show. Knives are for pros."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This section got provoked from two things.  
> I mentioned this story before, but for this section directly, one provocation was storm_petrel's story where the chopper went down at sea and Roque rescued Jensen by killing a shark with his KABAR (as Roque does...) and then dumping the tooth-encrusted boot in Jensen's lap at the VA.  
> http://archiveofourown.org/works/319548
> 
> The other was an entry on a Dreamwidth writing prompt journal, where folks post a fandom, the characters, and an intriguing sentence or phrase to provoke ideas. It works, too.


	20. Stories for Jensen

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Back Stateside sleeping in the House of Bad Dreams off base, playing music as loud as they want and eating whatever the budget allows and drinking cheap beer, doing their PT, taking Jensen to his doctor appointments and physical therapy, playing way too many card games...you'd think it was pretty close to Heaven, right?

“So what did you do to wind up with us?”  Jensen is practically wriggling in place messing with his cards, juggling a burger and soda, and occasionally twisting round in his wheelchair to tap out code on his laptop.  It is parked precariously on the arm of the sofa.  He uses one hand to type, making faces at his laptop and pleading endearments at it.

Pooch snorts.  “Officially?  I hacked off the General’s buddies.  I pissed them off.  I farted in their rum and cokes.  I left soapsuds in their beer and dead fish floating in their ornamental fountain.  I set their fucking mustaches on fire.”

“Unofficially?”  Jensen is hunching down, elbows on bare knees, staring at Pooch like a little kid waiting for a story.

Pooch sighs.  “I caught my previous Captain’s fair-haired boys trying to smuggle misappropriated Class III pharma--that’s triplicate notepads from the doctor heavy-duty kind of stuff--by the caseload on my damn transpo, and not for the first time.  I made the mistake of letting the Captain know that I did not appreciate getting roped into playing fall-guy or co-conspirator or whatever the hell they thought I’d sit still for.”

“What, you couldn’t get ‘em to cut you in?” Jensen says, grinning.  Oh, he’s just winding up Pooch.  By now, he knows better.

“I wasn’t asking, not with Jolene just getting promoted at the hospital.  Shit starts flying, they’d swap out a load, claim to their buyers that I stole it, and if law enforcement starts poking in, tie everything on her as soon as spit.  Do I look like somebody’s fall guy to you?”  Pooch shrugs, lays down a trio of threes, starts picking up the pot.  “Next thing I know, that asshole’s _sold_ my sorry ass.  He’s done some kinda blackmail shit with our Colonel Clay, who is a greedy bastard on personnel because nobody else will ever fucking volunteer for this crew, make no mistake about that.  So, that’s my sad story.  That’s the end of boring milk runs on diplomatic escort with nice clean helos that don’t even have any bullet holes in them.”

“Say it ain’t so!”  Jensen turns and grins at Cougar.  “What about _you?”_

Cougar shuffles the deck, pushes it over to have Pooch cut it.

“What did _you_ do to get stuck with us?” Jensen demands.

Cougar arches one eyebrow, takes the deck, deals.

“With _us,_ you know--”

“Shot you down in a UFO,” Cougar says.

Pooch splutters into laughter.  “Well, if you’re taking a royal _us_ from Jensen, then yeah--”

Jensen tosses a balled-up greasy fast-food paper bag at Pooch, who tosses it back with greater accuracy.

Cougar sighs, folds the lousy hand he gave himself, and shrugs one shoulder in the direction of the hallway before he wanders off to redirect the beer he’s been drinking.  As he goes, he hears Jensen say, “He’s not gonna tell me, is he?”

“That,” Pooch says, with that grunt he gives when he’s winning again, “would be telling.  And Cougar doesn’t talk, does he?”

“Well, he _does,_ but it’s pretty minimal.  Mostly the skeptical looks, _man_ does he do the looks.  ‘I can’t believe you’re such a _cockroach,’_ you know, that kinda look.”

“He talks more to you than anybody else we’ve ever seen.”

“Aaaand you’re not gonna tell me either?”

“You haven’t hacked it outta our records already?”

“There’s nothing there, man, trust me.  Cougs hardly exists, he’s so redacted outta everything.”

“Why do you think they’d do that?”

“He was doing scary shit for scary people?”

“We have a winner, give that boy a prize.  Cut the deck, man.  Hey, wipe your hand first, you’re getting ketchup all over the couch.”

Cougar hears Pooch still talking about cleaning up the ketchup when he wanders out of the bathroom, and he just quietly meanders back to the room he shares with Jensen.  He toes out of his boots, and curls up on his sagging bed with a reference book on Renaissance artillery.  Always handy to have a word like _cascabel_ to liven up all those board games that Pooch and Clay insist on playing, drunk or sober.

Twenty minutes later, Jensen wanders out of the bathroom, laptop case thumping softly against his crutches, and he thumps down the hallway to their shared room.  “Oh hey, I wondered where you got to, Pretzel-man.  You don’t want to play cards?”

Cougar tilts up the book a degree, and settles it back.  He’s got one leg propped upward onto the wall at the end of the bed, and his other leg bent on that support, with the ankle bone supporting the spine of the book just above his belly.

 Jensen settles on his own bed, mainly by hanging onto the crutches.  As his weight settles, there’s the groan of overtired bedsprings.  He bends low to see the title of Cougar’s book.  “Yeah, riveting.  Like, literally, riveting, huh?  Grape shot and random scrap metal and blowing up things and sapping castle walls and all that?”

“Outdated,” Cougar says.

Jensen actually pauses to think about it.  “Black powder guns, huh?  But not Gatling-type guns yet, right?”

“Some.  Experimental.  Slow.  Unreliable.”

“Right.”  Jensen sighs.  “Pooch just got a text message from Jolene and he’s off in happy lalaland talking to his lady.  Must be nice.”

“It is,” Cougar says, not looking up from his book.

“Yeah, but rumor has it you could have that kinda thang going any day of the week if you wanted it,” Jensen says, wistfully.

Cougar tilts up an eyebrow at him.

“I mean, the whole romantic thing, oh hi, love of my life, kiss-kiss, picket fence and dinner and bouquets of roses and--”

Cougar grunts.  _“Dog poo.”_

Jensen just stares at him for a moment.

Cougar sighs.  “Why do gay couples always get a dog?”

Jensen’s eyes get wider.

“Like Roque and puppies,” Cougar says.

“Oh, you mean, like, it’s a total reflex and he can’t help it?”

Cougar flicks a shrug with one shoulder.

“Really, _gay?”_ Jensen says, as if he’s stuck somewhere between squeamish and terrified.  The plush kissy lips, the silly patter, and the pink shirts for his niece may be very misleading. 

Cougar’s old PTSD stuff started surfacing again when Jensen was gone for only two weeks.  The hacker was staying in a hotel room doing VA specialist visits and catching up with his sister.  When he came back, he knew about Cougar’s night terrors, apparently in horrifying detail.  The other guys didn’t tell Jensen--no way would they tell him nuts and bolts of things like that.  He fucking hacked it out of somebody’s records, somebody’s notes on shit that Pooch or Clay told a shrink or something. 

Hell, Cougar knows Jensen can’t afford to get outed, he has people dependent on his salary to think about.  Or maybe he’s getting cautious about tangling with a nut festival like Cougar. 

Whatever common sense Jensen’s sister maybe beat into his head doesn’t matter.  Not really.  Cougar is _far_ too proud to take advantage of a guy who’s dependent on him for transport and immediate medical care.  Especially if the guy is conflicted about attempting such a risky liaison.

“Beating up flowers--” Cougar shrugs.  That is not romantic.  Just money spent.   It proves nothing.  Romantic involves _effort._ Just ask Cougar’s sisters, who have standards.

Jensen sags against his crutches, staring.

Cougar figures he’s not going to get an answer, and turns a page.  Then another.  The book is annoying him, it has an illogical break in the text where somebody cut pages out of it in the middle with a razor.  It wasn’t even for the illustrated plates.

“Oh, I hate it when that happens.  You want me to find it for you online?  Somebody is bound to have it digitized.”

Cougar glances up.  “Please.”

Jensen beams, flips open the laptop, starts typing.  Then he sets it open on the battered bedside cabinet.  “Good, we’ll let it hunt things down.”  Then he rubs his hands together.  “So, do you think Roque rescues puppies _because_ he’s gay?”

Cougar sets aside the book, swivels around to sit up.  He points one finger threateningly.

Jensen laughs at his expression.  “Okay, okay, I do wanna live, I’m not gonna share that one with the team.  But how come you’re saying--if you’re saying what I think you’re saying-- that your whole ‘married with life’ thing is not gonna happen with women?”

Cougar just gives a disgusted look at the room, where their gear is hung on improvised hooks, stuffed onto shelves.  Heavy on the clips of ammo and bits of metal that get greased a lot, really low on the ruffled lamp covers and puffy duvet end of things.  Cougar says, _“Una bandada de juveniles machos cabríos.”_

“Goats, huh?”  The hacker starts laughing.  “Macho male goats who stink, yeah.  Yeah, yeah, okay, true enough.  We’re lucky Pooch isn’t trying to stuff extra engine parts in here too.”

“Electrical,” Cougar says, with a sigh, and flicks his hand to indicate that he banished Pooch from getting away with _that._

 “Jeeze Louise, _thank you,_ we’d be sleeping crowded out on the stairs if he had his way.”

Cougar rubs his face, yawns.  At least the beer is good for making him sleepy.  “What do you need before bed?”

 “That’s it?  You’re going to drop this whole conversation and just turn in?”

Cougar holds out one open hand, meaning, _What?_

“That sneaky one about how picket fences equals _gay couples_ to you.”

“My women have fun, but they don’t _want_ me to meet their families.  I come back here.  I play card games with the Losers.”  He stands up, steps into his boots, stretches his arms upward for a long moment, gets that fine crackle of vertebrae, rolls his shoulders until his collarbones drop back in place.  Some mornings it makes him look ridiculous, like he’s going to break into a samba or bellydancing, or possibly just ninja-leap out the window.  Jensen usually looks at him like that’s what he expects.

But not this time.

Jensen stares up at him.  “Cougs, that’s just _sad--”_

“That’s what my grandmothers say too.  It’s okay.  Pooch is a nice guy.  He can go home to Jolene and rebuild cars.  I shoot people.  Where does that belong?  SWAT team?  Turn into Grizzly Adams, trapping for a living in Alaska?”  He makes a face, expecting Jensen to laugh at him for his known dislike of that much winter.

Instead, Jensen frowns, points at Cougar.  “Now, hold on--that is a _research_ question.  We need more data.  We gotta find out what other snipers do when they leave the service.  I can find data on that for you, okay?  Right?”

Cougar feels the corner of his mouth twitch.  “Okay.”

“That doesn’t mean you have to turn _gay_ just to find somebody to put up with you and your freaky love of guns, either--” 

Cougar just blinks at him, amused.  “Who said _turn?”_

“You just-- what?  _What?”_

“I live with guys.  I sew up cuts on guys.  I shove medicine into guys with tropical diseases.  I listen to guys being disgusting fart-brained hungover assholes all day.  I try to keep guys from getting their sorry butts shot.  I drill PT on guys who whine more than any six-year-old girlie ever does.  I get maybe a couple hours with a woman sometimes, it’s nice, then she’s happy, she’s done, I go home.  I get a little tired of the whole womanizing rep when it’s _guys_ I’m putting up with all day.”

“Fart-brained?”

Cougar rolls his eyes.  “Cheap food.”

“Umm, right.  You said--right.  That was-- jeez, that was a fucking dissertation, for you.  Okay.  Okay, blowing past DADT like it’s not even a thing, like it’s not a stupid rule that fucks up the greater scheme of things-- sure.  And let’s not argue whether bisexuality is real or just another stage in the development of the true queer tough guy, okay?”

“No.  No argument.  Say what things you want tonight.  Toothbrushing?  No?  Lights out in five.  Five, four, three--”

“Cougar, you’re so ornery!”

“Two, one--”

“I’m fine,” Jensen says, in the dark.

“Outstanding,” Cougar says, in deadpan imitation of their bossman Clay.

It makes Jensen laugh.

Which is really the point, come right down to it.

Cougar could stand to hear the man laughing like that some more.  A lot more.


	21. Epilogue:  Fallout from Afghanistan

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is, at long last, where that original inspiration, an actual reference to KMAYOYO, finally gets used.

Clay says the General thinks they ought to pack up, turn around to go right back to the sandpit, when it’s only been three days full of visiting their local VA and getting Jensen through his final month of doctor appointments and rechecks.  The computer tech has plenty of pain tolerance, the cracked shin is good, and his feet are healing nicely.  It’s other things that make it hard.  Some past trauma there, the geekboy is really _not_ good about blood draws and doctors' orders and doing what he’s told on his physical therapy to avoid further injuries.  But hell, yeah, Clay has got Jensen’s transfer papers stamped as comm tech for the Losers, done deal, in that short a time.  That’s because the General has Plans.

The General’s got some wildhair idea about sending them back out there to the Kurdish border to find the rest of the diskie ship project work that escaped ahead of them, and shut it down, track down Wade’s guys.  Somehow, of course, nobody knows what’s up with Wade in recovery, all very hush-hush.  Roque’s pretty sure that, once they turned over their prisoners to the Bagram MPs, who had to come down in a big convoy to meet them, somebody picked up Max’s boy before he could tell too many tales.  Now the chain of command apparently can’t actually _remember_ where they put him.  Why Max’s boy Wade qualifies for military medevac help but not military justice is just one of those mysteries of the chain of command far above Clay’s head.

Clay says Roque is being a cynic again. 

Roque says if Clay thinks anybody will ever testify at a court martial of Wade or anybody else, he is wearing his sparkly Disney princess slippers and claiming frogs drive him around in pumpkin coaches.

Clay says Roque has been hanging out too much with Jensen lately.

Jensen keeps asking earnest, awkward, bouncy, FNG questions of the General, questions which somehow turn prickly and develop into a thicket of barbed wire tangle when the General tries to patronize him or duck answering the damn question.  Jensen cuts Clay far more slack because at least Clay tries to be honest with them.  There’s a lot of Clay scratching his head and shrugging and admitting he doesn’t know the answer, and tossing it back, asking Jensen for suggestions on how to scope out ways to get an answer.  It’s become one of Cougar’s guilty pleasures, watching Jensen tie his superior officers into knots.

The General says they don’t need to know what kind of justice will be administered to Wade for the events that never happened over in the places they never visited near Chora.  The General also claims that Max doesn’t have enough juice to give the General any problems, Max is out of the country and under some cloud with the powers above, it’ll be fine, don’t hold back on the mission. 

Which is so much stinking litter in the chicken coop that needs cleaning that nobody bothers to say so.  It also says more about the General’s willful ignorance of Max, and Max’s money, and Max’s scary connections, and Max’s extensive minions, than it should.

From what little Jensen has found out so far about Max, they’re in for all kinds of grief already, and worse if they screw with his projects any further.  Jensen claims the General is an “ignorant sock puppet for ignoramuses,” whatever that means.  Cougar has been not-thinking about the nerve-wracking intel that Jensen has been able to dig up on Max.

All that bland assurance by the General does not convince the rest of the Losers.  Roque thinks the General is a fool and they’re being set up for a fall.  Pooch doesn’t want to respond to calls to come back in, even though they all know where to find him.  They know where to find Cougar, too:  Running Jensen around to his appointments.

Clay tried to warn CENTCOM.  Wade is bad enough.  He’s one of Clay’s crazy ex-brother-in-laws, and Clay knows something about the kind of arms traders Wade likes to cozy up to.  Apparently Wade _prefers_ to hire more expensive guys who speak English, fancy mercs who were ex-SAS or Special Forces.  Hiring ex-KGB as staff is a bit of a come-down for Wade, although they’re probably better value per hour in hot fire situations than broken-down SAS mercs who got busted out of the forces for this or that major crime.

Clay warned the General that Wade, alone, is not just bad news, he’s a fucking air raid siren warning about Max, who is really far beyond bad news. 

By now, since Wade lost that captured showpiece diskie ship and a pilot who could actually communicate with it, all those mercs and ex-KGB guys have probably moved everything, gone to ground with a new lab, and kidnapped a new batch of eggheads to dink away at reverse-engineering the physics.  They’ll have more guards, they’ll embed deeper into a corrupt local political landscape, and they’ll be a lot more alert to interference.  So either the General should sink some resources into finding their new hideout and raid them this week, or let it die down for six months and let them get careless.

If it’s raiding this week, the Losers are not up on deck for it.  Roque has been picking bar fights and Pooch is on leave with Jolene, and Cougar’s signed out on his own leave.  He gave his word.  Clay knows he promised to walk Jensen through this last bit, and start getting him fit safely. 

If only the General’s pet crazies will do for this assignment, then it’s time to wait.  Let the prey think they’ve been forgotten, instead of stirring it all up uselessly and muddying the water, Cougar thinks.

“Hey, Jensen, don’t pout, you can do intel things faster here stateside anyway, keep from getting bored,” Pooch says.

Cougar tilts the hat, looking at Pooch.

“After physical therapy,” Pooch adds hastily.

“No,” Cougar says, flipping open the brakes on Jensen’s wheelchair. 

Clay smiles.

“But goddamn it,” Roque says, “we’re supposed to--”

“KMAG YOYO,” Cougar says, and pushes away Jensen in the wheelchair.

“Kiss my ass guys, you’re on your own!” Jensen says, translating the acronym.  He laughs way too loud.

It takes some time to get Jensen up to a bathtub, and Cougar thinks it a _lot_ of times before he actually says it.  But eventually Cougar says, “Your pants, they bother me. Take them off.”

“You are way too bossy,” Jensen says.

Cougar shrugs.

“Beauty goes with bossy, huh?”

“Pants,” Cougar says.  He’s made no promises about what happens after that.  It could even involve sucking in his own tummy until the weight of his belt carries his pants down off his hips.

Jensen doesn’t need to know why, this morning, Cougar carefully picked out the heaviest belt he owns, either.


	22. Lent

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Yes, Pooch talked the Losers into visiting the home town of his enamorata, Jolene, somewhere in the green peaceful suburbs in Illinois. It hasn't, of course, _stayed_ that way.

Might as well face it, half the tension in a big-city civilian ER isn't the injuries coming in, or the overcrowded conditions, or the harsh indifference of battle-toughened staff. It's the risk of crazy relatives of the patients storming in and finishing what they started.

The outright certifiable and impaired folks aren't the problem. Cougar knows he can ignore the man with Tourette's talking to a pillar. The man does that to make sure everybody knows he isn't cursing and yelling at them personally, that he can't help it.

Cougar can evade the grasp of the old woman wandering around mocking people's clothes and grabbing their sleeves to make them listen to some conspiracy theory and leering at him with a comment about his ass.

He doesn't even mind helping a staff member guide a massive young guy flailing around, turns out the guy's drunk off his ass and having flashbacks to Iraq, where he was a civilian contractor.

No, what he's watching for are relatives of the guys that Roque just put in the hospital for insulting Pooch over his gal Jolene. You do not diss their gal Jolene, ever. So he's got an eye out while he's waiting for Roque to get his hands x-rayed.

They've already had one round of that, where Cougar had to knock a cell phone out of one guy's hand before he could call in his bros, and restrain another from pulling a piece and shooting Roque while he was arguing with the EMTs at the scene that he just needed some tape until he could go to the VA hospital down state, two hundred miles away, instead.

 Hospital security is better and faster than he expected, but he isn't depending on them. Two police reports for the night is plenty.

Pooch wanders in holding two coffee cups. His eyes move fast, he sizes up the crowd, he smiles at the guy with Tourette's, and he visibly relaxes. When things got ugly, the guy with Tourette's went all quiet, spooky as hell. Pooch offers Cougar one of the cups.

Cougar sighs at the first sip, tips his hat brim gratefully.

"Yeah, so, Jolene's okay, home safe. No, she didn't want me to stay home with her, not really."

Cougar holds up one hand, palm up flat.

"Yeah, yeah, stop it, I did have ta come back here. Keep you guys in line."

Cougar just shakes his head a little.

"Crazy Roque, man," Pooch says.

Cougar shrugs, agreeing, and sips his coffee.

"So hey, what are you giving up for Lent?" Pooch says, teasing.

Cougar gives a crooked smile. He lifts his off hand into a duck-beak and makes silent quacking gestures.

"Huh," Pooch says. "Talking up the ladies?"

Cougar gives him a look:  ‘ _Don't be ridiculous.’_

"Fighting? You ain't giving up fighting, man, I saw you tonight."

Cougar tilts the hat brim down, still smiling.

"Talking at all?" Which Pooch thinks is hilarious.

Cougar shakes his head, taps his fingertips together in the quacking yammering gesture again.

"Man, this time you got me stumped."

There's a gurgle of laughter, too loud, from the main door, and Jensen strides in, all blonde spiky hair and screaming lime green shirt and long furry legs and flashing round glasses.  Not exactly the style du jour in suburban small town Illinois, but he gets away with it.  "Giving up yet?" he says to Pooch. "You're cheating, trying to ask him off all sneaky by yourself."

Cougar rolls his eyes. Of course they have a betting pool on it. They've been waiting two hours, they're bored.

"So you know any better?" Pooch replies, sniffing. Definitely money involved.

"Last guess?" Jensen demands. "Want to raise the ante to kitchen duty for two weeks?"

"Oh hell," Pooch says, with a shrug. "Sure."

Cougar arches an eyebrow at each of them.

"Schmoozing up ladies in bars."

"Arguing," Jensen says.

Cougar tips the hat brim at the blonde guy who can't sit still.

Pooch just roars with laughter. "It's not like he talks anyway!"

"Yeah, but you know when he is not going along with your train of thought, and when he thinks you're an idiot, and you know when he's boiling mad at you, that sure counts as arguing!" Jensen says, smacking his big knobby hands noisily on his bare knees in some complicated hiphop rhythm, humming a little. He's in board shorts and flipflops and it's all just a little too bright and loud after the night they've had. "So I figure, if he's promised not to argue for Lent--you do know how long that is, right, Cougar? That's a _long_ time not to call me names and poke me and stuff-- hey Pooch, you better take advantage while you can, right?"

Pooch grins at Cougar with that evil, evil look. It makes him look like a round, bald, genial, totally demonic gnome. "You're gonna be soooorrrry."

"Yeah, that's kinda like part of the point, isn't it?" Jensen says.

Cougar rolls his eyes.

"I'm just waiting to see what the guys come up with to test it out," Jensen says happily, bouncing in place and grinning. "How long can Cougar keep from just losing it and--"

Cougar snaps out a hand and thumps Jensen on the ear with a little stinging snap to it.

Jensen yelps. "That's not arguing, that's assault!"

Cougar growls.

Pooch is slapping his knees and laughing like a hyena. When he can muster enough breath, he starts singing Aretha Franklin's song "Respect."

But Jensen is absolutely right about the guys trying to get him riled up. They already think it's funny to pester him into talking. He is really, really not looking forward to it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Another piece originally inspired from prompts on the fandom prompt website.


	23. Role Models

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Well, they all know Jensen's niece is important to him. Would a great uncle ignore the conflicting and repressive messages that careless pop culture is trying to drill into her vulnerable brain? Of course not. Besides, she's a Jensen. She's going to need all the coping mechanisms she can possibly learn.

"Broadly speaking--" Jensen says, pointing out things on a tiny map on his laptop that they can barely see.

"I don't know, do you ever speak to broads? You're a geekboy, what do you know from broads?" Roque says, lounging back on two legs of a rickety kitchen chair.

"All the time. Only I call 'em dames. They like that a little better. Great movie actresses worth your respect, man, they're all playing dames."

"I wouldn't say that, there's plenty of really good parts that aren't for dames--" Clay objects.

"No sir, I beg to differ. Have you read any of the movie critic critiques of Hollywood's on-going failure of diversity, the lack of meaty roles for women, or people of color--"

"No," Clay says, blinking.

Cougar sidles in from the kitchen, trying not to grin. Clay's an officer, a middle-aged white guy, what does he know from privilege? Well, he knows a few things, dealing with the crew he's got, seeing it happen to them right in front of him, and it makes him mad. It's always a pleasure watching him come to a real rolling boil in defense of his team.

"Driving Miss Daisy, man," Roque says.

Jensen perks up. "Yeah, that's great, that’s exactly the idea, but there aren't nearly enough of those roles, the statistics--" He starts tapping on the laptop, muttering.

"You seriously care how many women get to play something in the movies besides--" Roque waves his hands in circles like he's describing the motion of an exotic dancer's tassles.

"Oh, like Angelina Jolie in Tomb Raider-type parts?" Jensen says.

Figures he'd think of the game-based example first. Pooch is rolling his eyes, and Cougar smirks at him.

Jensen doesn't even notice, just steamrolls onward. "Well, sir, let me tell you, I started going through lists of of movies to send my niece, and if you skip the Disney heroines as a lousy model, and the suicidal lesbians, and the-- well, there's not a whole lot of role-models out there--"

"You have lists," Clay says, leaning his head forward, frowning.

"Of course! Like picking out a piece of tech, or toys for Pooch's kid when it gets born, or anything else you want to give somebody as a present, right?" Jensen turns to Roque. "Like learning how to take care of a puppy, right?"

Roque tilts his head. "Sure."

"That was just low. Hit 'm with a sucker punch, bringing up puppies, man." Pooch frowns.

Cougar tilts the hatbrim in agreement.

"No, it's totally fair, I'm just trying to make an analogy here--"

Cougar pushes back his wet hair and folds himself up slowly in a crouch on the arm of the sofa near Jensen, stretching out his Achilles tendons and his hamstrings and his lower back all at the same time. He's still sore, though the hot shower loosened up his muscles. Might as well stretch out his legs, he has a feeling this is going to be a long argument with Jensen diving away from the planning, veering off in all directions.   Currently he is going on about the failure of plantation-style monoculture of bananas, coffee, and chocolate crops.

Weird thing is, Clay is letting him do it, just watching him freewheel at length.  One flick of Clay’s finger indicating his wishes, and Cougar can put out an open palm and push just enough to tip Jensen off the couch onto the floor, ending the argument.  Even weirder, Jensen always seems to think it’s funny.  He laughs at himself for not noticing when Cougar has got up that close to him, like it’s a professional challenge, not life or death out in the field.  But Jensen knows he’s there, this time.  There’s the little distracted eye-flick, lingering on Cougar’s wet hair, on the damp spots on his shirt.  He stutters onto a new topic every time he glances aside, too, like his brain is shorting out.

Cougar understands Jensen's brain shooting off in all directions. What he doesn't understand, and what's so fascinating to watch, is why Clay is letting it happen. The CO's reins are totally slack, letting Jensen blow off random firebursts and free associations and ADHD cartoon wackadoo.  Whee, lookit him go!

Why? Cougar wonders, fascinated. Why is he letting Jensen wander so far off-topic?

"So did you decide what movie you were giving your niece?" Clay asks, frowning a bit, looking even more tired and rumpled than usual.

"Yeah," Jensen says, and blinks at Clay. "And right, you're wanting some intel here, okay. Back to the mission here, sorry guys. Okay--" he pauses, looking at their faces. "You guys all look totally bushed. This stuff--what I've got isn't really good, it's gonna take some concentration to work it out. So, hey, do you want to skip the maps tonight? Since we're in civilization for once, I can get the Poochman to drive me in, take a flash drive and get this stuff printed out on big papers tomorrow, so we scribble out stuff on maps on the kitchen table?"

Clay scrubs at his eyebrows, blinks again. "Yeah, that'd be good. That'd be great, actually. And Jensen?"

"Yes sir?"

"I don't mind hearing about your niece. Ever. It's great hearing about her. Keeps us grounded, reminds us there's something more to think about.  Pooch, take Cougar too, you guys should visit an ice cream parlor, those two need to put on some weight.  Okay, who's got dibs on the shower next?”

Jensen just lights up, his eyes going electric blue. "Wow, thank you sir!"

Clay smiles, gets up. "Any time."

Cougar stares up at Clay, who just picks up his leather kitbag, smiles back at Cougar enigmatically, and makes a finger-salute gesture as he departs for the bathroom. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Also inspired by a prompt at the fandom prompts website on Dreamwidth, and possibly by that story about them going to an ice cream parlor that didn't simply end with the boys eating their weight in sprinkles...


	24. Maps?  Who Needs Maps?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sometimes the Losers get a little fast and sloppy on the details in their advance planning on ops. Sometimes they were careful about planning, but it doesn't fit reality. And sometimes it just unravels like a cheap towel once they're in the field.  
> Since this is one of the first ops for Jensen, both for his return to the field after his injuries and as a member of Clay's team, he has zero sense of proportion about getting chased through the souk by guys on camels shooting old rifles. Guys who actually are pretty good at it, too, shooting sniper guns that were state of the art back in 1950-something.

"Now _that's_ what I call an explosion," Roque says, pleased.

"Not bad for improv work," Clay says.

Pooch is laughing still when he lifts one hand off the wheel, snaps his fingers toward the back seat of the Humvee.  "Map, guys?  Driving into the sunset is fun, but we need a bearing kinda like soon, now."

There's rummaging.

"I haven't got the map, I thought you had the map," Clay says.

"Hey, your fucking source was supposed to have the map, wasn't he?" Pooch says.

"She," Clay says, and everybody rolls their eyes.

"Not who showed up," Roque says.

"What?  What do you mean?"

"I got this scary old witch doctor, 'bout a million years old, muttering shit about old camel stops that dried up fifty years ago back when Haile Fucking Selassie was ruling things out west--"

"Thirty-six years," Jensen mutters rebelliously.  "Not fifty.  Selassie was deposed from the rule of Ethiopia in 1974, that's when the Soviet-backed Derg--"

Roque growls something nasty in Russian about the Soviets that makes Pooch laugh.

"Go on," Clay says impatiently to his 2IC.

"Anyway, so this witch doctor, he scratches some stuff in the dirt, Jensen took a picture of it, these other dudes show up waving guns and chasing _your_ sorry ass, we got our asses robbed and pickpocketed like shit when we're _running_ through the suk, and then come to find out, Jensen's cell phone's dead anyway--so there's your map.  Right there."  Roque clonks a knuckle heavily on Jensen's skull, with a melon-noise that's so insulting and ridiculous that even Jensen laughs, and he thumps Roque back on the shoulder.

"So you remember what the diagram was?" Clay asks.

"Sure," Jensen says.  "But what it meant, with half of it in Amharic that Roque doesn't speak--"

"So we're guessing," Clay says, smiling.  "Again."

"Sure are," Roque says.

Jensen's busy drawing with a scrap of paper and a stub of pencil from all the crap he always carries in his pockets.

Roque pokes at it, making corrections.

"Right, so, it'd be nice to get within a coupla compass points of the next oasis, yeah?  It's not like those dudes back there will wanna tell us," Pooch says.

"I'm more worried about gas," Clay says.

"That must be cuz you never had a radiator leak like this old thing does," Pooch says, thumping the wheel in front of him.  "Gas tanks are all full.  We'll be outta water before we run out of gas."

"So look for date palms.  How hard can it be?" Clay says.

"It's not like they've got water sources marked on road signs out here!" the Pooch shouts back.

Cougar snorts.

"What's so damn funny, anyway?" Pooch demands.

Cougar leans forward, points at a jagged black shape on the horizon.  "Strike-slip scarp.  Drive for the base of it."

"Yeah, so?"

"That's where the break in the ground water supply should come to the surface."

"If there _is_ any water left out here!" Roque growls.

Cougar shrugs.  He's seen worse terrain, hunted in deserts much drier than this, at the end of the summer.  There's some fibrous stuff that will burn if you work at it, and there's goat tracks in the dust alongside the ruts of the road.  Somebody drove their animals in the long, long flat walk across this plain.  He thinks the camel tracks are older.  Certainly the corrugated tire marks are older than that.

 _"Sonuva--_ what, you think we're gonna nibble on leaves and cactus pads?" Roque says.

"No," Cougar says.

"What's so funny?"

"No.  Old-world.  No cactus.  Only euphorbias."  He grins at them.

Roque flings both hands in the air.  "And goats, if we're lucky."

"Yeah," Cougar agrees, pleased that Roque noticed the tracks too.

"And if we're not lucky?" Jensen asks, squinting up his baby face at Cougar.

Cougar shrugs.  "Bugs.  Whip-scorpions, locusts, stuff that comes down to the water."

"Not those big ol' gross snails sitting dormant on all the posts?"

"No, those can give you parasites, things like filariasis," Cougar says.

"This is your medic talking, repeat, do not eat the snails," Pooch says solemnly.

"And cook the goat really well, right?"

"If you've got enough wood to burn."  Cougar settles back in a slouch, tips down the hat. "Boil your water first."

"You know, you're not making me feel any better about driving around in the wrong end of the Sahel with nothing but my wits--" Pooch says.

"Such as they are," Roque says acidly.

"Thanks man, your fucking vote of confidence always feels good--"

"What have we got to barter for stuff?" Clay asks.

There's more rummaging.

"What you got?" Jensen says, poking Cougar awake.

Cougar grunts, tilts the hat.  "Got game."

"What?  Playing that pit and pebble game they like?  Really?  When did you learn that?"

Cougar grunts.  "Last time I was out here eating bugs."

Jensen laughs, briefly.  "Really?"

"Cougs, you're the _wors_ t for winding up noobs, I swear," Pooch says.

Cougar tips the hat as for applause.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Inspired by beautiful dune pictures on Pinterest, two trips to Death Valley, information on preparation for survival in the desert, and an an odd bit of wiki entries I wandered across talking about Haile Selassie of Ethiopia. Also, a dim horrible memory of an old entomology textbook written for the Army Corps of Engineers. Yes, huge snails piling up dormant in layers on African fenceposts is entirely true. The snails also like to sneak into things like moving containers and truck wheelwells and toys and furniture, so fumigation is just as important for those as for the invasive tree snakes trying to escape Guam. Did I mention horrible? With pictures.
> 
> This is also the end of the UFO chapters for the 2012 Big Bang, to date.  
> I plan on writing more as a complement for the 2013 Superheo Bang group about how Cougar and Jensen actually get together. There will be Avengers involved, because who can resist hints that Clint Barton shows up in sniper school classes?  
> The Bang Party Post is here.  
> http://ante-up-losers.dreamwidth.org/28300.html?thread=618124#cmt618124  
> Ideas, cheerleading, beta-reading, complements of other kinds all welcomed heartily.

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by the vid posted by DW member ladyjanelly, including the song by Hayes Carll called "KMAG YOYO", the lyrics listed on the YouTube post, and subsequent comments with ladyjanelly. (“What if the song was actually true?”)  
> YouTube link here:  
> http://youtu.be/no0ZJcPN7tA  
> Plus, hearing an NPR story about woman talking about hating the Warren Zevon song “Werewolves of London,” and getting teased by her dad for years over it, to the point of it becoming an in-joke. Given the number of shapechanger stories in the Losers fandom, this song of course cannot pass without comment.  
> Warron Zevon's vid of it here.  
> http://youtu.be/iDpYBT0XyvA  
> Plus there’s the various fics with various pieces of accepted fanon which include Cougar’s devotion to women, chocolate, and his absurdly fast metabolism.  
> I owe several months’ worth of helpful amusements to Losers fandom. Besides just being outright silly, I’ve tried to be accurate about details. Some folks far more expert may notice that some of the details are a little vague--calling a grenade-hurler a Russian RPG-7 is perhaps using a more generic terminology, these days, than it used to be during the Iraq war.
> 
> I’m also incapable of passing up an in-joke, apparently. There’s a reference here to pirates, using the Spanish word, piratas. Besides pirates being one of Jensen’s favorite things, this is a shout-out to the Spanish TV series, Piratas. It has a starring role by Oscar Jaenada, the actor who plays Cougar. One of the fans translated English subtitles for the very first show of the series, and that vid gives us a great look at Oscar’s quickness. The character himself couldn’t be any different from Cougar if he tried. As with other fan-generated content on YouTube, this may not be a long-lived link. I should also add that pt. 2, the one after this one, opens with a violent flogging scene, warning for anybody who finds that kind of violence triggery.  
> http://youtu.be/UY9z_ZwBGAE


End file.
